Up Character Quotes

#1. It pays to cultivate popularity. It doubles success possibilities, develops manhood, and builds up character.

Orison Swett Marden

#2. The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.

Michael Shurtleff

#3. The narrating voice that tells 'Middlemarch' is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.

Philip Pullman

#4. Plot, or evolution, is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character.

William Wallace Cook

#5. I don't buy into that pressure to be glamorous all the time. It's impossible, I mean, you get a pimple in the morning, you wake up with bags under your eyes, you see if you can use it in your work, maybe incorporate it into your character.

Halle Berry

#6. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.

Linda Sue Park

#7. Well, everybody knew their character. I was the only one who didn't have a partner. I basically showed up when people got in trouble. Where I came from, I don't know. Nobody knows. But I would show up to help.

Bubba Smith

#8. 'Firelight' is a beautiful story about a lot of young women. My character, Caroline, is a girl who has a bad boyfriend, and he ends up getting her locked up and incarcerated.

Q'orianka Kilcher

#9. I have quite a normal family and I'm bored with how normal my family is. I want to mess stuff up a bit. I chose the messed up characters because I find that that's acting. I want to explore emotions that you otherwise wouldn't be able to explore.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#10. That character in conversation which commonly passes for agreeable is made up of civility and falsehood.

Alexander Pope

#11. I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

Steven Spielberg

#12. Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.

Sara Gilbert

#13. My characters are never heroic. They are mostly lost and trying to find the right door to open and they end up opening the wrong doors.

Gaspar Noe

#14. There are moments in life where you don't get a do-over, where the true nature of your character is revealed. You either step up to the plate or lose your chance forever. These moments shape a life. These moments earn you the right to say to yourself 'at least I got the important stuff right.

P. Dangelico

#15. The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

E. M. Forster

#16. Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well.

Jennifer Beals

#17. In some ways, what I learned is that you can take a character and breathe with them, and it's up to the audience to interpret rather than you putting moral stamp on the character.

Aden Young

#18. Once a character has gelled it's an unmistakable sensation, like an engine starting up within one's body. From then onwards one is driven by this other person, seeing things through their eyes ...

Deborah Moggach

#19. I'm far, far, far from that. But of course, that's one of the joys of acting is that you can move up in the world, even if - you know, in the characters that you're playing, even if you don't.

Maggie Smith

#20. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Laura Linney

#21. I really enjoyed playing Vinny Vedecci, the Italian talk show host. He was the first character I ever came up with where I gave him a name and a way of dressing.

Bill Hader

#22. Your talents determine what you should do;
your character, where you end up.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#23. 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

#24. You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.

Tom Stoppard

#25. Schedules on TV are so tight, and it feels like they get tighter and tighter with every passing year. The idea of asking where your character's come from or where they grew up - you would just get a little bit laughed at.

Jessica Raine

#26. In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.

Anonymous

#27. Up to here, in general, we have mainly stuffed the brain of the young people with a indigestible multitude of varios notions, without thinking about enough of the prime necessity to form their character.

African Spir

#28. Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose.

Paul Park

#29. You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up.

Jenji Kohan

#30. I really love research. It's one of the things I love most about my job. I feel like it's me in the lab cooking up the character.

Kerry Washington

#31. Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

Greta Gerwig

#32. I want a character to wake up one day and feel like, 'I can face it'. That, to me, is happy. I want the characters to rescue themselves, though you use the relationships you have, to make you strong enough to be able to do that.

Cecelia Ahern

#33. The physicality of any character is always split up into fast, slow, high energy, low energy, what kind of personality he has. So that's where the physicality comes in. And flying through the air is just something you have to do if they ask you.

Mads Mikkelsen

#34. Oliver Queen/Green Arrow is a character whose core is about legacy and responsibility. And that all comes from his father and the responsibilities of living up to his legacy.

Jeff Lemire

#35. My husband doesn't like to fly. He does fly now because he doesn't want our daughter to grow up thinking he is a Don Knotts character. But when we were first married, he didn't fly.

Tina Fey

#36. In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling.

Nikolai Leskov

#37. Each guitar has its own character and personality, which can be magnified once the player engages in beatin' it up

Billy Gibbons

#38. It was the most pleasurable thing I've ever done, playing this character, and I just remember feeling so at home and so - I don't know, I was just happy - and it just wasn't ever work! It was like a sandbox for me, and I would crack myself up rehearsing.

Jenna Elfman

#39. When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

Linus Roache

#40. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Northrop Frye

#41. I inherited that penchant for intellectualism, a character flaw that these days can only be thoroughly eradicated by getting Z'ed up.

John Green

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. In part, it's so difficult to come up with something original, to come up with a character nowadays. If you created a globetrotting adventurer, he'd be compared to Indiana Jones. If you created a super spy, he'd be compared to James Bond.

Marc Guggenheim

#45. But the character was so successful, that first one, that they wrote him again and he came in right at the end of the first year in a show called THE BOX. I was up for the Emmy for that one too.

Gavin MacLeod

#46. To Lilo, Suleika, Constance, and Raul, thank you for coming up with some really good character names when I was in a pinch.

Kayti Nika Raet

#47. My character's kind of grown up with Katniss. The beginning of the story, they're more or less brother and sister than anything. They're best friends. They've been keeping each other alive. It's a little frustrating, for the character. As the character, not as me.

Liam Hemsworth

#48. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

Charlie Chaplin

#49. Everyone makes mistakes, but only a person with integrity owns up to them.

Nicole Guillaume

#50. Rehearsals are set up so that you find out all the nuances about your character. You never want to beat yourself up. It's about finding the right direction, and most of the time, the right direction is not what you think is the right direction. That's why the director's there: to guide you there.

Djimon Hounsou

#51. I try to keep myself in what I'm doing and focused on character stuff, as opposed to getting wrapped up in worrying or being nervous. It won't benefit me, in any way, to focus on that.

Katie Cassidy

#52. 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

#53. I consider myself as a character actor. I like the sports analogy, which I do all the time; I'm an avid sports guy. I'm a golfer, but I grew up as sort of an avid fan and participant in baseball, and I'm like a relief pitcher. My job is to come in and throw strikes.

Clint Howard

#54. If you do a character that resonates enough, people are always going to see you as that character. It will just be up to me to make choices where I can flex other muscles.

Danny McBride

#55. It's funny, I used to do a character that was just a baby - just an adult baby. I would get up onstage and complain about adult stuff, but as a baby. I was in a diaper, and I would require hugs from the audience and reassurance and stuff.

John Gemberling

#56. I would have to say that I have to concentrate more when I'm doing comedy. There are so many details that make up any character, but developing a character for a dramatic role seems to come more naturally.

Kaitlyn Dever

#57. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.

Leah Cypess

#58. It's tough. We don't have a character-driven show so I think the fans get really frustrated because they don't get to see any consistency in terms of what's happening romantically. We kind of just have to take it with a grain of salt. It shows up where it shows up.

Eva LaRue

#59. I think it's bad for fellas when they lose their mothers. Mine was such a character. Oh it was sad, really sad. And, with her gone, the family home was gone, so what was left of any roots I had were completely dug up.

Paul O'Grady

#60. There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#61. The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

Donald Pleasence

#62. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.

Oliver Goldsmith

#63. Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#64. John Woo is a very nice and kind person; he gives almost no direction at all, trusting me to come up with the character. But when I think of him, I think of explosions!

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai

#65. Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

James Buchan

#66. 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

#67. Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.

Dustin Hoffman

#68. I like looking at the characters. Seeing them always brings up some voice or attitude. I am much more visual, and that works so much better than having someone tell me what the character is all about.

Frank Welker

#69. I play a recurring role for a character named Doctor Imo. I assist the villain and show up from time to time.

Keir Dullea

#70. 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

#71. Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.

Paul Brunton

#72. I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

Aidan Gillen

#73. You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.

Alison Brie

#74. Given up, Khouri? It's not in my dictionary.

Alastair Reynolds

#75. If I wasn't going through a thing where I was also being my characters offstage, uh, I'm much happier just wearing the most low-profile things that I can come up with just so I can get down the street ...

David Bowie

#76. I'm a huge fan of good, procedural-type shows on television ... there are a lot of roles for women. But there aren't a lot of great network television roles for girls that will let you start a character in one place and finish up with her in a totally different one.

Rachael Taylor

#77. Why do women use make-up? They know the world is a make-up

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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

Nora Roberts

#79. I think we've all been kind of ... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

Mark Ruffalo

#80. I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.

Emma Donoghue

#81. If it's strictly comedy, I like to bring some darkness to it. If it's strictly drama, I always like to lighten it up as well. I like to find some kind of dimension and make my characters human, so that it doesn't feel like a sketch and feels more like a slice of life.

Nestor Carbonell

#82. I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

Michael Ondaatje

#83. 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

#84. Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news - something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.

N. T. Wright

#85. Sometimes we meet a character and we fall so hopelessly in love with him or her that we want to be that character, no matter how tough they have it, no matter how they might mess things up.

Sherman Alexie

#86. I moved to the east coast when everybody else was going to the west coast. I (then) chased it back toward the west coast. I built my career up by doing small roles (which led) to principal roles and getting bumped into main character roles.

Drew Waters

#87. Presumptions of guilt or innocence may sometimes be strengthened or weakened by the place of birth and kind of education and associates a man has grown up with, and good character may at times interpose, and justly save, under suspicion, one who is accused of crime on slight circumstances.

Levi Woodbury

#88. With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you're constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.

Jennifer Lee

#89. People build up a picture of Johnny Depp as being some sort of weird pirate character. In reality he's incredibly nice ... one of the nicest people I've ever met.

Freddie Highmore

#90. In my experience, it's usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.

Richard Dreyfuss

#91. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to set up in the fault-finding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you permit it.

Og Mandino

#92. A long time ago, I learned not to go up to the boss and ask what's happening to my character. I haven't done that for 20 years, since I was on 'Days of Our Lives.'

Michael Easton

#93. That's what makes a character interesting from an actor's perspective - the more screwed up, the better.

Jeri Ryan

#94. If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character ... Would you slow down? Or speed up?

Chuck Palahniuk

#95. My name is Ella; that's who I am at school, hanging out with friends, while I'm doing homework. But when I'm up on stage, 'Lorde' is a character.

Lorde

#96. 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

#97. Everybody has their favorite character.That's the only way I pick, whatever is going on in society, whatever I think folks will laugh at that's what I come up with.

Jeff Dunham

#98. For a week, you carried my short story all folded up in your jeans pocket, said you felt sorry for the main character in it. That main character was me, of course.

Franki Elliot

#99. Conversation with a view to timely instruction will help to build up a strong Christian character and stimulate growth in grace.

F.F. Bruce

#100. I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be.

Gabrielle Hamilton