Characterization Process Quotes

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

You're doing it to make the character as specific as possible, so that it's a specific individual that you're talking about, not that whole class of people.

When you build characters from the outside in, they become, oftentimes they become like 'Saturday Night Live' characters or they become like caricatures of the character.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

You draw on whatever's relevant to the part you're playing; it makes it more personal.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

I love creating new characters that are whatever they are.

I don't know what I am. I guess you can call me a character actor in the sense that I'll never be an ingenue. You know, that's over. My shot was missed. I take a normal person and make them more of a character. I don't know what that would be called.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

I start out giving characters archetypes and parameters. Once I know the basics and have a rudimentary model, it's easier to carve unique curves and edges. It's quite easy to guess how a character is going to react if you know their background, and at a certain point, you realize you understand them personally.

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.

If I get the walk of a character, that helps me find them. So I'm constantly looking at airports and train stations, registering walks.

You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to.

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

The nuances and organic characteristics of a character become second nature if I'm doing my job well.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.