Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I try to have a balance of things you like and things you don't like about a character. But once you start that, all these scripts are like, "You play the douchebag friend of Ashton Kutcher." It's all these characters that are overconfident or hyper-masculine.

I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

The roles on 'American Horror Story' are so complicated.

The more complicated the character, the better I am. It's the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

The beauty of Sudhir's protagonists is that they are not shown as black and white. There are various layers to the characters.

I really want to work on characters that have a lot of complexity and you don't always get that in comic book movies because they're not character explorations. I have nothing against movies like that, but I do see them as kind of like a cheeseburger.

The audience basically likes complex characters, and bringing out the complexities is the actor's job. The audience doesn't have the script, the actor does.

Sean Young is such a sweetheart and just absolutely lovely. From day one, she was just very easy to be around. She's definitely a 'mom' and very much a girl's girl. She likes talking about makeup and the business and just being a woman.

Every villain needs her story told.

I always respond to characters who have depth. I'm always interested in those people. They're the ones who surprise you.

What I have learned from working on those great shows is what is the DNA that makes them so deeply involving and interesting for an audience over a long period of time. So much has to do with character, complexity, and sophistication.

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

I want to give my characters nuance.

I really enjoy 'Mad Men,' but I'm hugely into 'Homeland.' The characters are very well drawn and complex.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

I always think that the most interesting characters are those that are trying to cover something or those that have some sense of bravado or composure.

I do like characters that have flaws, some sort of pathos to them that they are trying to sort out.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is...opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation.