Characters Quotes

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

I don't see my old films, but I think of the characters I played as friends, like the women I meet in my life who made strong impressions on me. I remember them and they are part of me.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Dr. Cox mentors the rookie doctors with a spoonful of dirt and then a cup of sugar. I see him as an archetypal descendent of two of my favorite curmudgeonly characters: Lou Grant and Louie De Palma.

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.

I mean I tried to transform myself through characters throughout my career.

I did private study for about a month, five days a week, six hours a day. I came to understand the character in ways that I never would've previous to that. I was so innocent in respect to ways of creating characters.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

Changes have taken place since year one. When Caruso left, that was a big change. We've been able to adapt nicely. It's given us new opportunities for different characters and story lines.

I love it when talented actors can bring characters to life. Anybody who wears their feelings on their sleeve and has a harder, crusty shell - like I do - is definitely protecting an inner sensitivity.

I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it's very simple and honest and contained. You don't need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that's another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little.