Empathy for Characters Quotes

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

I never try and play a bad guy to be bad and to be brutal and to be nasty and vicious, because I think you're going to be very cliche there. You know, you've got to find the truth in that character and what he believes in. It just happens that, you know, he's wrong.

Character is half the reason we read. We're excited because of the plot, but we care because of the characters.

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

So when things start going badly, you're invested in the characters in a way I think amplifies the horror and the fear because you're invested.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

I cry at the end of every episode of "Girls." I'm just so overwhelmed by the truthfulness with which [Lena Dunham] conveys human nature.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

I like flawed characters, and I like seeing people who are supposed to be not villains but antagonists. There are elements to them, which are really annoying, but you kind of see where they came from. You see the things that caused those inadequacies.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I don't have any special approach for playing dark characters. That's because I never looked at them as dark characters per se. For me, they were real people.

Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

Sometimes I'll go for something more because of the story, or more because of the director. But, generally, I have to feel like it's something that I have a real sympathy for - a person that I can completely go, "Oh, wow, oh, I'm there." Otherwise I don't feel like I will be able to pull it off at all. I know I haven't done everything very well in the past; some things have worked and some things haven't. But I need to feel like I can feel about the person, understand that person, I suppose.

What we were most hoping to achieve with Shots Fired: empathy for all of the characters and conversations about our criminal justice system, which is broken on every level, from the street all the way up to the highest level of government.

If you don't invest in the characters, you don't care if they get killed. It's more fun if you know them.

You definitely put a bit of yourself in every character, and you always have to have an understanding and empathy for the person that you play.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

To me sympathy for a character has little to do with how morally upstanding or wicked they are. All that really matters for me is how human and interesting they are. I happen to be drawn to characters who operate under intense internal pressure, which often comes from some deep psychological conflict.

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

Through all the bad guys that I've played, they're justifiably bad - they have their reasons. It's been important to me.