Real Character Quotes

#1. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. My favorite kinds of stories are the ones that have these big crazy genre hijinks and then a real honest, meaty, emotional story where we're watching a character grapple with some real things.

Greg Pak

#3. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

Michael Gambon

#4. Telling the truth ... is not solely a matter of moral character; it is also a matter of correct appreciation of real situations and of serious reflection upon them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#5. What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.

John Stuart Mill

#6. My favorite artists from comics were early ones like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko who had a real heavy ink style. Captain America, co created by Jack Kirby, was a favorite of mine and I sometimes use an altered version of his costume on some of my characters.

Marcel Dzama

#7. I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

Jim Jarmusch

#8. Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.

Bryn Greenwood

#9. I think that the beauty of 'Spud' is that everyone can connect to the character of Spud in so many ways. It's about real experiences that happen to kids all the time.

Troye Sivan

#10. If you want to know the real character of man, intentionally and timely give him the test of 3d's; delay, denial and disappointment

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#11. A solid base for any comedy is just honesty and truth, and it coming from a real place. As surreal as this show gets and is, ultimately, we're dealing with a character that most can't see the way that I can see it.

Elijah Wood

#12. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

Taylor Mali

#13. Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't.

Shannon Hale

#14. I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.

Roger Deakins

#15. grotesque character of everyday occurrences conceals from one the real misery of passions. BARNAVE While

Stendhal

#16. We should be authentic: the 'real deal'. Neither a clone nor mimic be.

Fennel Hudson

#17. I like playing a character that admires real musicianship, and real talent and hard work. I think that's a good message for everyone.

Elizabeth Gillies

#18. You have to defend your character. That's your job, if they're hiring you. That doesn't mean you can't collaborate, but you do have to make some big, bold choices. We do that in real life, too.

Jonathan Tucker

#19. I like doing sequels. Basically, I think it's a fun thing to follow characters in time. In real time.

Julie Delpy

#20. It was new to play a woman who plays with her sincerity, and who is a seductress, a manipulator and a liar! I was able to compose a character as opposed to being very natural, so it was very interesting for me. It was great to realise that I could be this kind of real woman!

Audrey Tautou

#21. The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

Stephen Vizinczey

#22. The biggest similarity between me and my character is that we've both played clubs for 20 years. In real life, the clubs aren't quite as controlled - and my hair isn't quite as in place as it is on 'Ally McBeal.'

Vonda Shepard

#23. Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated ... , and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character, Selina said.

Edna Ferber

#24. There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#25. Scenes change all the time. Scenes will change while you're shooting them, and you just have to roll with it 'cause that's what makes it funny. It's not being stuck in your character and how you're gonna do something, but to react to other people and to really have a real-life conversation.

Yara Shahidi

#26. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#27. In real life, you don't know what's going to happen to you, so why would your character know? It's liberating to play the emotion your character is feeling at the time and not know what's coming up. I like it.

Erin Richards

#28. The real self is who you are when you're at home, when you're comfortable, and the false self is what you're pretending - and the reason you pretend is because you want to create a character for the surroundings you're within.

Benjamin Clementine

#29. There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

Corin Nemec

#30. Obviously, with a CGI character, you're building a character in much the same way as a real creature is built. You build the bones, the skeletons, the muscles. You put layers of fat on. You put a layer of skin on which has to have a translucency, depending on what the character is.

Peter Jackson

#31. My objective is that I don't try to do the same thing. I try not to emulate something I've done before. And, I'm a real people watcher, so I like trying to play characters that are as diverse from each other as possible, simply because it's more fun for me, actually.

Emily Blunt

#32. If you play a real character who's famous and still alive, it makes things easier if you have the luck to have a good relationship with them.

Daniel Bruhl

#33. Real character is formed in the midst of the battles of the soul.

Hugh B. Brown

#34. The film [Close Up] made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.

Abbas Kiarostami

#35. Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You're giving a gift. You're helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They'll become real.

James Chartrand

#36. The difference between House M.D series and me is that I am real, he is just a character build by someone. BUT...?!

Deyth Banger

#37. You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

Clint Eastwood

#38. I thought of the character being real, a living person, not a drawing.

Ollie Johnston

#39. Character is the real foundation of all worthwhile success.

John Hays Hammond

#40. We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

Paul Haggis

#41. What has first drawn him to Max was the man's unyielding character, not whether he was real-life boyfriend material.

K.A. Merikan

#42. The thing that really makes me happy is the real work and rehearsing and creating the character and the process of making the movie. Hollywood's not real.

Penelope Cruz

#43. In real life, we do things out of character, constantly. A couple of days ago, my shoes were hurting, so I walked barefoot through New York. Someone who has known me my whole life would think that was so out of character. But I did it because of the circumstances.

Allison Williams

#44. Scarce any man becomes eminently disagreeable but by a departure from his real character, and an attempt at something for which nature or education has left him unqualified.

Samuel Johnson

#45. Basically, I think that there are some characters that you can just allow the truth of your character as a human being in your real life to come through.

Edward James Olmos

#46. I loved playing Go Go, because the character's so extreme. And she's pretty close to my real character. Especially the fact that she liked her sword with a lot of accessories.

Chiaki Kuriyama

#47. My stand-up is more like how I am in real life. I don't really do a character thing in stand-up. It's just a bunch of sentences that are supposed to be funny.

Zach Galifianakis

#48. I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.

Charles De Lint

#49. Stephen Moyer is probably the most gracious, gifted actor that I've met. He's really intelligent. He has a real sensitivity to his character, to scenes, to scripts.

Valerie Cruz

#50. The roles I was lucky enough to get were real stretches for me: usually a character who was older, or a little weird, or whatever. And it was hard, not just for the lack of work but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you.

Kathy Bates

#51. The point was - he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character ... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.

John Irving

#52. My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

Francine Rivers

#53. In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

Kevin Hart

#54. I'm not concerned with whether you got to the top. I want to know how far you climbed. That is where the real achievement is found.

William James Moore

#55. I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

Nora Roberts

#56. I enjoy playing real human beings after playing a lot of larger than life characters. I love playing true to life characters and that is what I intend to do for the majority of my career.

Michael Jai White

#57. I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.

Dana Spiotta

#58. With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character.

Michael Eklund

#59. The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.

Dylan Moran

#60. Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.

David Mamet

#61. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

Charles De Lint

#62. God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

Joyce Cary

#63. I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

Fred Melamed

#64. When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

Ed Helms

#65. Have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however

Edgar Allan Poe

#66. As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy - you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it's not real.

Clare Bowen

#67. Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

Joe Eszterhas

#68. The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

Harry Lloyd

#69. If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.

Jared Harris

#70. I love when I get to play these characters that are bigger than life. There are roles in animation that I never get to do in real life - and it appeals to my ego as an actor to play the Queen of Everything. I admit it.

Virginia Madsen

#71. Great occasions often stimulate a person to do something great, but that tells nothing of his or her real character. Great is the person who does good always, in sickness and in health, in riches and in poverty.

Abhijit Naskar

#72. As long as I can wear a wig I can be any character, and in real life I can be myself.

Ginnifer Goodwin

#73. While I find inspiration in real life, the actual stories are, thankfully, works of fiction - which, given the considerable turmoil in my character's lives, is probably a good thing!

Nicholas Sparks

#74. I think one's character on the athletic field does not have to have anything to do with the way they are in real life.

Peter M. Brant

#75. In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.

Wallace Shawn

#76. So, yes, the five years that we've been working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has evidenced a real deepening of all the characters, not only mine.

Rene Auberjonois

#77. With the tone of the show, like a lot of the films, the Marvel creative team has found a way to bridge really exciting stuff that has real stakes. They balance some of the action stuff that the fans of the comics really want to see with characters that people can relate to and who are very human.

Clark Gregg

#78. It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned.

Edmund Burke

#79. The most crucial thing is to learn the craft: how to string sentences together, how to make your dialogue sound like real people, how to properly pace a story, how to develop interesting characters.

Stephen Coonts

#80. I love to design for women, it's really open and very free. I always think of my friends. I think of both fictitious characters, real people from the past and the present. I am not a woman, but I find women so beautiful and so fascinating.

Marc Jacobs

#81. I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.

John Barrowman

#82. I think character is real important. And you know, and I think the public does.

Tom Selleck

#83. I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.

Mark Millar

#84. I love trying to play the not-confident guy, the guy against my normal character, because that's when real acting comes into play.

Kellan Lutz

#85. In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Henry David Thoreau

#86. I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#87. Real freedom comes from the mastery, through knowledge, of historic conditions and race character, which makes possible a free and intelligent use of experience for the purpose of progress.

Hamilton Wright Mabie

#88. The real ornament of woman is her character, her purity.

Mahatma Gandhi

#89. What I love about the Don Draper character is that he's so real and filled with all these contradictions.

Jerry Della Femina

#90. The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

Wes Anderson

#91. Beautifully drawn, solid, compelling characters against a background so real and scary I left the lights on all night. It was great!

P.N. Elrod

#92. I said, 'Wouldn't it be great if Matt Damon's character fell in love with a girl with a real butt?' They were like, 'Yeah sure, sure - here's your personal trainer.'

Franka Potente

#93. You jot down ideas, memories, whatever, concerning your real life that somehow parallels the character you're playing, and you incorporate that in your scene work.

Chris Cooper

#94. The test of real character is what a man does when he is tired.

Winston Churchill

#95. A hero without faults is like an omelet without little bits of eggshell in it.

Colin Cotterill

#96. When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life.

Victor Levin

#97. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?

Jess Walter

#98. If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

Ford Madox Ford

#99. Neither the Choice of his Friends, nor that of his Dishes, was the Result of Pride or Ostentation. He took Delight in appearing to be, what he actually was, and not in seeming to be what he was not; and by that Means, got a greater real Character than he actually aim'd at.

Voltaire

#100. It's quite a trick to use three instruments to tell the story of two people, but Vores carried it off; three, for once, is not a crowd. Each member of the trio gets important solos, but there is also a real ensemble character.

Richard Dyer