Ludicrous Character Quotes

Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book! ~ Philip Roth

Kingdom is a signpost to the holy. ~ Jen Pollock Michel

His genius, during his earlier manhood, was of that exclusively agricultural character which applies itself to the cultivation of wild oats. ~ Charles Dickens

It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. ~ Mark Twain

It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not. ~ Harrison Ford

I always wished there was somebody like the Coen Brothers and they appeared. And so yeah, my favorite role that I've ever done was in The Man Who Wasn't There. That's my very favorite character I've ever played. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

It takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing, ~ William Faulkner

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end. ~ Charles Wright

You've got to understand what makes the character human. ~ Marcia Gay Harden

Everyone should experience a wrong accusation…if only to learn how not to be quick to accuse another. ~ Chukuwuneta Oby

It's obvious that if you're going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they're in and use as little or as much as necessary. ~ Cillian Murphy

The rule of thumb for a director or producer - which prevents them from just sticking their names on everything - is that you have to contribute substantially more than 50 percent of the character dialogue and story. ~ Harold Ramis

I've always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we're in, and forget everything else. ~ Helen Mirren

The universe was once conceived as the passive stage upon which the dramatic conflict of human wills was enacted and resolved. Today man has discovered that that which seemed simple and stable is, instead, complex and volatile; his own inventions have put into motion new forces, toward which he has yet to invent a new relationship. Unlike Ulysses, he can no longer travel over a universe stable in space and time to find adventures; nor can he solve intimate antagonisms with an adversary sportingly suitable in stature. Rather, each individual is the center of a personal vortex; and the aggressive variety and enormity of the adventures which swirl about and confront him are unified only by his personal identity.... The integrity of the individual identity is counterpointed to the volatile character of a relativistic universe. ~ Maya Deren

Whereas our words represent our person, our character is our very person. A person's usefulness, the things which can be entrusted to him, the responsibilities he can bear, and the things he is able to accomplish altogether depend on his character. A carpenter determines the use of a piece of wood based on its quality. Laziness ruins one's usefulness. Accordingly, character has very much to do with the Lord's service. Consider those persons in the Bible whom God used. They were used by God because they possessed a character that was fit for His use. Their character was simply their person. They became persons useful to God because their character could be used by Him. Since Abraham, Moses, and Paul all had an excellent character, God greatly used them. The destiny of our usefulness to the Lord hinges on our character. Whether we are useful before God depends upon the suitability of our human character. ~ Witness Lee

We can have the final word on hate, neglect, disease and all the other insidious characters that still script their way into our stories ... for now, but not forever. ~ Jennifer Beals

When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest. ~ Jonah Hill

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. ~ Ayn Rand

Acting has helped me understand people, not only because you are acting as a character, but also because you are watching other actors work. That really helps you identify in life when someone is acting, not being true. ~ Steve Martin

Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character. ~ Tabitha King

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt? ~ Miranda July

Often the negative emotions are merely habitual ways of thinking that have been given place in your mind over time. We tend to believe these patterns are part of our character that cannot be changed but they can be broken. Don't accept being manipulated by your feelings. Freedom from your troubled emotions may be just a prayer away. ~ Sue Augustine

White House cultures inevitably reflect the president's character. Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly honest, good person. So was his White House. ~ Bill Drayton

My mother is quite the character. You'd hate her. Sometimes I think I hate her too, but mainly I feel sorry for her. Which is kind of worse. ~ Karina Halle

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place. ~ Lydia Davis

The loves of all hearts are so many mirrors revealing their characters. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Love for that princess became for him the expression for an eternal love, assumed a religious character, was transfigured into a love for the Eternal Being, which did to be sure deny him the fulfilment of his love, yet reconciled him again by the eternal consciousness of its validity in the form of eternity, which no reality can take from him. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

I'd love to be what I have been. ~ Raheel Farooq

I thought of the scene while writing scenes with Rebecca [Hall] and wrote it like an opening montage of showing where someone works. If you see a film about a car mechanic, you'd show the place they work and what they do. So, that's what I set out to do with Rebecca's character. I thought it probably wouldn't even make it into film but I ended up liking it. ~ Nicole Holofcener

We can't allow science to undo its own good work. ~ Aldous Huxley

In high school, I was performing "forensics." You take a section of a play and portray all the characters. I even went to camp for forensics. ~ Allison Silverman

Upon achieving your dream, when you look back at the days of struggle, it's your footsteps that should appear in your memories, not your lost character, for losing character means losing life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest. ~ Anne Tyler

If you trust that the people making the show love the source material and the characters, and it's a different medium and there are different requirements for long-form storytelling that will hopefully carry over a number of seasons, then it's exciting. ~ Greg Bryk

Guys play characters that won't grow up and something catastrophic happens and they have to grow up to save the day - that's pretty much what today's comedy is about. ~ Chris Rock

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away. ~ Gertrude Stein

I get no pleasure from politics; it's not in my character. ~ Bidzina Ivanishvili

I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing. ~ Josh Hartnett

Have a culminative look at just one snippet from Ipolit's famous "Necessary Explanation" in The Idiot:

"Anyone who attacks individual charity," I began, "attacks human nature and casts contempt on personal dignity. But the organization of 'public charity' and the problem of individual freedom are two distinct questions, and not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is an individual impulse, the living impulse of one personality to exert a direct influence upon another....How can you tell, Bahmutov, what significance such an association of one personality with another may have on the destiny of those associated?"

Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can't is the reason he wouldn't: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse-one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age's truest vision of hell) laughed out of town. ~ David Foster Wallace

There is not a single soul that jealousy looks good on. Nobody! It looks ugly on everybody and it makes us act ugly - it makes us act out of character. ~ Beth Moore

Sincerity is that whereby self-completion is effected, and its way is that by which man must direct himself. ~ Confucius

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry. ~ May Sarton

My parents had raised me to not judge a person based off the color of their skin but by the composition of their character. A man was nothing if he wasn't true to his word and honorable. ~ Chelle Bliss

Value work. But not any kind of work. Ask yourself "Is the work vital, strengthening my own character, or inspiring others, or helping the world?". ~ Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

I'd been going to study Pre-Flowering History," Tiercel offered.
"Now you're living it," Kave said. ~ Mercedes Lackey

I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy. ~ David Wenham