Backstory Quotes

My backstory is so tedious. ~ Ray Lamontagne

Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside. ~ Dave Hickey

With none of Vader's backstory available at the time, and having just invented the Noghri species for this story, I came up with the idea that Vader might have designed his mask to look like a stylized version of a Noghri face, the better to facilitate his command of the death commando squads. ~ Timothy Zahn

You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory? ~ David Filmore

When I develop a character, I usually start by creating a backstory with whatever information I have access to. ~ Daniella Alonso

Maybe you can bring that up at the next fan club meeting too."
"Hey! I don't even know what you're talking about, okay? I hear things when I'm on my travels. I don't even care about stuff like that." I cared so hard. I had actually gone three times to the fan club meeting. They knew me as Mervin. I had a backstory and everything. It was my turn to bring muffins next time. I was considering poppy seed. Or cranberry. Fun. ~ T.J. Klune

Maybe your past isn't perfect. Maybe it was brutal. Maybe you were brutal. Maybe you've got more scars than you thought one skin could hold. You can't linger on those thoughts. You will drown in them. After all, it's only an interesting backstory if you can get past it. ~ Jessica Hagy

I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in [Cinderella]. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly. ~ Kenneth Branagh

I tossed off a mention of the pirates early on. And they became integral to the backstory. Sometimes now I imagine them in the woods. They scare me. All men. Dirty and wearing red. ~ Edan Lepucki

Usually when you're playing a character, you think a lot about their backstory. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story! ~ Colm Toibin

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

When you're a regular on a TV show, they give you more of a backstory, so with these recurring gigs, you have to make up your own backstory. ~ Alan Dale

And the Three Bears: No one ever questions why the Papa Bear and Mama Bear slept in separate beds. What was going on in that marriage? More backstory needed. ~ Jim Gaffigan

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. ~ Sarah Vowell

In a hospital, there's not anyone who's generally trying to do you harm. You're generally given a backstory about what happened to them, but not about their life, so you get to work on saving their life. But you know whose lives you're saving overseas, in the Army, to a certain degree. You know whether's it your guy or a bad guy, and it's generally not anybody in between. ~ Brendan Fehr

The beauty of 'The Walking Dead' and the beauty of being on a television show for a while, is that, it's your backstory, it's part of what you are, it's what you carry with you every day. ~ Laurie Holden

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory. ~ Damian Loeb

I create my own backstory regardless of if I'm told something about the background or not. There's always more that you can develop in your head that makes a character more layered, more honest. ~ Regina King

For me, the best characters are the ones that feel fully formed inside and out, so I try to have a very clear vision of exactly what they would wear, top to bottom, who they are, what their backstory is, what their family situation is, who are their friends, just creating as much of a three-dimensional character [as possible]. Because I think you could do a very broad character, but as long as there's some emotional truth to them you can get away with really crazy things. ~ Nick Kroll

I want people to be more open and tolerant. I want them to know that behind every stranger is a backstory that is the common denominator - for we all share in the human experience: pain, sadness, grief, lack of love, and then, with hope and help, step by step achievements. ~ Oprah Winfrey

I love making the backstory for myself. I think it's important. Every part I play, I work on the backstory. If it's fully written out in the script, or there are intimations of it in the script, fine. If not, fine, no problem. I'll fill it in, or I'll create what it is. ~ Jeffrey DeMunn

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

Nancy herself noted that the fact that Mom had run a food bank and soup kitchen for ten years and that I'd volunteered at the Cocina almost every day after school made for a "great backstory." There was something so hollow about hearing Mom described as a backstory that my breath caught cold in my throat. ~ Jenn Marie Thorne

I don't think you need to watch Arrow and Flash to appreciate what it is Legends has to offer. The beauty of this show - and they do this on Flash, and they did this on Arrow - is that we do spend time on character. We do spend time on backstory. We do take a moment in between the sci-fi special effects to tell you who these people are, so that when something happens to them, you actually care. ~ Wentworth Miller

9/11 was my first day teaching at Harvard University. My classes were all canceled and I got back to town two days later. I'm one of those people who doesn't think the world has changed any at all since 9/11. It just seemed to be almost inevitable, something like that. That's one of the reasons why the backstory of Fay Grim goes all the way back into the '80s. I was trying to sketch out the continuity of all this hanky-panky between the security agencies of the world. ~ Hal Hartley

There's too much emphasis on backstory and personal stuff in music now - it's not going to make the music better if I hear that you did karate for the six months leading up to it. ~ Alex Scally

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next. ~ David Mamet

Show enough backstory to allow the reader to glean and make assumptions about what remains behind the curtain of time, yet continues to influence the character's worldview, attitudes, decisions, and actions. ~ Larry Brooks

I hope to land roles where my presence is carried on throughout the film. I'm looking forward to taking on a role with a complicated backstory and yet someone who refuses to lose sight of hope. I know that it will happen someday. ~ Nadine Velazquez

I think bringing depth to characters means really needing to find out who this girl is, what is she passionate about, what makes her tick, what gets her going in life. So I did a lot of backstory for who she was and sometimes it comes across screen and sometimes it doesn't. You never know, because you're not the director, but you can only do your work and hope that it somehow subtly is infiltrated in that. But I think the characters I've played for the most part have depth, just not in the way that you think they do. ~ Amy Smart

I find that a lot of my best character stuff and ideas come unwittingly from novels. In scripts, it's a lot about the outward signs of whatever's happening - you have the end result. Whereas in a novel you get a buildup of the whys and wherefores, and you're let into the backstory. ~ Alison Pill

For me, as an actor, the most challenging thing is creating the character in the beginning because you have to write their backstory. The easy part about doing a sequel is that you've done the film, so you already know their backstory. ~ Thomas Ian Nicholas

We see in the backstory of Acts 16 the beautiful reconciliation that the gospel achieves, not just of unholy individuals to a holy God but superficially incompatible people to each other! Jesus takes strangers and makes them a family. ~ Matt Chandler

I'll go home and write my own backstory. It will be easier to remember. ~ Kasie West

The guys that write Once Upon a Time were major writers on Lost, and we had lunch when I started on OUAT and the first thing I said to them was, "I spent five years on Lost, you have to tell me, was my character good or bad?" They looked at me and said, "We have no idea." That's why you have to make your own backstory. I decided Widmore was the evilest of the evil, but in the end, not even the writers knew. ~ Alan Dale

Maybe you know the backstory of Batman and so you know that story isn't a factual tale. However in its simplest form the story of Batman's inception is actually far more believable than the Bible in its simplest form. The only reason people buy the Bible story is because piled onto a simple story about a space wizard is all this other fluff to try and make it look like it has more substance than it really has. But if you strip away the fluff and say it straight you can see it for what it is. ~ Casper Rigsby

I just saw dialogue, in the audition, and had no backstory. I was like, "I'm just going to be myself because I have no idea who this is or where he's coming from." The typical questions that actors have to ask themselves were very hard. I had to imagine, a little bit, and just made it work. ~ Giles Matthey

There are three things that any scene in a book or short story can do: (1) It can advance the plot, (2) It can explain the background or backstory, or (3) It can deepen the characterization. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. ~ Sarah Waters

Knowing Chris Bennett's Writing as I do, I expected Only Superhuman to have an imaginative plot and a compelling superheroine in Emry Blair. What I hadn't expected was for the backstory to make so much sense. Usually science is the first causality of superhero stories, tossed aside with the breezy rationalization: 'Hey, it's comics!' Only Superhuman is, to my knowledge, the first hard science superhero story. And the Story is the better for it. ~ Mike W. Barr

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book.

What you need is subtlety. ~ Sandy Vaile

As an actor, you can have your own backstory and prepare all the details that you need to know for your character. ~ Dwayne Johnson

I knew everything about her backstory. I skimmed through all the books and read through everything that happened between Sam (Chaske Spencer), Emily and Leah (Julia Jones), so by the time we started filming, I knew everything that had to do with my storyline. ~ Tinsel Korey

I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you're just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

In books, often the bad guys have a story too, and sometimes it is just as tragic as the hero's. ~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

I knew how to act and had studied acting and enjoyed it, but I'd never pushed myself to really perform as an actor, and create a role, and have the whole character's backstory. ~ Eli Roth

Backstory is like a flavour you can't quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it's there and it enhances the flavour, but it's intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly! ~ Sandy Vaile

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way. ~ Steve Martin

Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell... p.195 ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Having read the source material, I had to have drawn from that. As a fan, I wanted to remain true to that character, but it was really cool because, as we were figuring these characters out, I realized that there was a lot more backstory, rather than what I had gotten just from reading the book. Glenn doesn't really get much of a backstory there. He's just seen as this kid who is put in this situation, not knowing where his mind-set is, but then you slowly see him start to develop. ~ Steven Yeun

Without a reservation without some romantic backstory. Even if it wasn't my job, I wouldn't have had the heart. Her father doesn't like him." "I don't like him either." "Yes, you do. Or you would. I'm really sorry, but - " "What is that?" he interrupted, moving back toward the door. "Was that somebody screaming?" "They're at it again." When he glanced back at her, frowned, she lifted her shoulders. "They really wanted a room." "That's . . . wow." Head tilted, he listened another minute. ~ Nora Roberts

Her attraction to him hadn't dulled in the least. She stared at him. He stared right back with those beautiful distant green eyes.
"Guys," Pookie said, "I know yal have a bit of backstory to work out, but can we lay off the wistful gazing? This ain't a Joan Wilder novel, if ya dig what I'm saying." ... ~ Scott Sigler

I think the biggest mistake you can make in creator owned work is having info-dumps like, "Here's how this world works!" It's just like someone playing dungeon master and boring me with the backstory of their f***ing world. Just bring me into you story and get it cooking. ~ Rick Remender

There was silver on it, blood dark from the passing hours. and her bathwater was black with it. ~ Victoria Aveyard

If your hero's backstory is more interesting than their present story, you're writing the wrong book. ~ Kristen Kieffer

Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on ... Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it. ~ David Mamet

Does graciousness mean you want to help - or that you don't, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it's not deserved. It does not require a good night's sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory. ~ Leslie Jamison

I don't know why people assume shit like that. Like being an atheist requires some sort of tragic backstory. ~ Katie Henry

And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I'd harmed before, somehow - that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I'm honest. It's not like there's anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end. ~ Jason Heller

trapped in his past, refusing to move forward. Unless this is a specific part of the character's arc, a character caught under this mountain of backstory can be painful to ~ Jordan McCollum