Real Character Quotes

Character alone will have real effect on the masses. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I am drawn to characters that go on journeys, characters that are real people, that have life. ~ Penelope Wilton

You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about. ~ Clint Eastwood

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors. ~ Mike Leigh

We can deny angels exist, convince ourselves they can't be real. But they show up anyway, at strange places and at strange times. They can speak through any character we can imagine. They'll shout through demons if they have to. Daring us, challenging us to fight. ~ Sucker Punch Movie

When you're actually feeling a character and you're going through the real emotions, and you're not fake acting, that energy stays with you and sometimes you can't get it off for days. It just resonates in your body, unless you have some sort of release, whatever it is. ~ Tinsel Korey

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real. ~ Fred Melamed

You put on a face for the public. The face isn't false; it's just another side of you. If it were false, you couldn't last. People want something real and natural, and if they catch you acting, you're dead. It has to look real. In order to look real, it has to be real, and I've always thought of the characters I've played as real people. ~ James Garner

With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character. ~ Michael Eklund

Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak. ~ David Mamet

Most of our occupations are low comedy ... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own. ~ Michel De Montaigne

It's like real life: We don't get a preview of what's coming up, thank God, and we don't build our own character from what we're going to be informed with in the future. ~ Frances Conroy

Faith by its very nature must be tried... what God does with our faith must be something like workouts. He sees it to that our faith gets mushed and pulled, stretched and pounded, taken to it's limits so its limits can expand... If it doesn't get exercised, it becomes like a weak muscle that fails us when we need it. ~ Jan Karon

Being a painter myself ... whenever I could dispense with architectural precision, I indulged in the picturesque, in which case I sacrificed a few details when necessary in favor of an imposing effect that would give a monument its real character and also preserve the poetic charm that surrounds it. ~ Charles Negre

At 24, my head was as shiny as a cue ball on a billiard table. I naturally thought this meant curtains. Actually, I found it helped. When I was too young to play real character parts, they mistook me for older because of the bald noggin. I got juicy roles right from the start. ~ Frank Cady

Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk. ~ Joe Eszterhas

If the original of any of your characters would win a libel case against you, you have failed to create a real character. ~ John Braine

Sorry, I didn't know that you had a vagina, I'll refrain from using vulgar words for now on. How about it smells like pee pee and poo poo, with a little bit of spew, is that better?"
"You're a real character, you know that?"
"Thanks, I try," she says. "Now, let's get the shi-stuff and get out of here."
"Fine," I say. "But for future reference, I like it better when you curse. It's pretty funny to see a pissed off Tinkerbell." I run from the baseball mitt being hurled at my head, laughing all the way . ~ Katelin LaMontagne

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause. ~ Kiese Laymon

The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The imageis in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it. ~ John Crowe Ransom

Fortune is no real thing.
But men who cannot bear what comes to them
In Nature's way, give their own characters
The name of Fortune. ~ Menander

I'm an actor, I created the character myself originally. I do tell the fans I appreciate that they think he's real. It all finally comes down to the writers who really got the character and wrote so many memorable lines. ~ Creed Bratton

Real faith never disappoints because it is in God, grounded on His character, promises, covenant and oath. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques. ~ Glen Cook

I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

I think the qualities I look for in a girl I'd like to be my girlfriend would be the way Lindsay's character is before she becomes a plastic. Very real. ~ Jonathan Bennett

No one can write their real religious life with pen or pencil. It is written only in actions, and its seal is our character, not our orthodoxy. Whether we, our neighbor, or God is the judge, absolutely the only value of our religious life to ourselves or to anyone is what it fits us for and enables us to do. ~ Wilfred Grenfell

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

It is immature and lazy to imagine we know everything there is to know about someone before we know that someone. We don't know their stories, their histories, their real live human feelings. We don't know their favorite movies and best memories and what makes them afraid. It is unfair to take one fact, one thing they've said or we heard they said, or one thing they wrote, or someone else's experience, or a group they identify with and make a character sketch. If people did that to us, the picture would be so woefully incomplete, we wouldn't even recognize our own description. ~ Jen Hatmaker

As readers, we want not only a strong story, but also characters we can relate to, characters that feel real. We have to find something of ourselves in them. Each character, even those only there to serve the mechanics of the plot, should have a number of layers. The entire world you are stepping into as a reader must feel real. It must have resonance, you must be able to touch the light; smell the smells. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man's business but build up his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is that we shall lose if we flinch or rebel. ~ Maltbie Davenport Babcock

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am particularly unlucky in meeting with a person so well able to expose my real character, in a part of the world where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree of credit. ~ Jane Austen

Rob Doherty has been a real superstar for us The Mentalist for years. He is an extremely talented writer, and he just tapped into the DNA of this character in a way that we'd not heard before. So, from the moment it walked in the door, and then we read the script, it was a definite player for us. ~ Nina Tassler

I love playing these characters that are crazy tough, though. Because I am not in real life. Not at all. ~ Katee Sackhoff

The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;
not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known. ~ Horace Mann

I love to design for women, it's really open and very free. I always think of my friends. I think of both fictitious characters, real people from the past and the present. I am not a woman, but I find women so beautiful and so fascinating. ~ Marc Jacobs

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Alejandro Amenabar is a different kind of director than I lot of the directors I've asked for. He really asks you to enter his dream as opposed to, you know, a guy like Sidney Lumet or something is going to ask you to create a character almost like a documentary. He wants you to make the people really real and he's going to capture it like a documentarian. ~ Ethan Hawke

The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of reflection. ~ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

I do think that animated films have the ability to touch you someplace. There is something about live action movies that is different because we know the characters are real people, so they always stay flawed for us somehow. But animated films touch us in a very clear, uncomplicated place. They have that ability. And an animated character can make an expression in a way humans can't do. ~ Steve Martin

Listen to the way people talk. If your characters sound real the rest is easy. ~ David Eddings

We must at times search our own souls and discover what we really are. Our real character, much as we would wish, cannot be hidden. ~ James E. Faust

I remember in the Carpenter version, you got acquainted with the characters and really knew them. It was a real character piece. Each actor was serviced in the movie, and we tried to do that in this movie as well. I like the fact that there was a European, first-time director. I'd known of him because I'm from Europe. I knew him as a commercial director and thought one of his commercials was great. I thought it was an interesting take on such a big-budget cult classic. ~ Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man's real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man's true character. All through Scripture there is an intimate correlation between the development of a man's character and how he handles his money. ~ Richard Halverson

If the characters [in a movie] aren't real, if their lives aren't realistic, if you call bullshit at any point in their journey, then the rest of it is invalid. ~ Justin Simien

I decided to work on hand animate because the animators work as authors in every little scene and it brings real soul for characters. ~ Luiz Bolognesi

Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character. ~ Philippe Halsman

On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:
It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I'm pretty sure that Sól's curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It's already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to 'read between the lines' or 'its there if you look for it' and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm. ~ Celine Kiernan

I thought of the character being real, a living person, not a drawing. ~ Ollie Johnston

The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it's Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you're not just stuck in plot. ~ Judd Apatow

When I read of the vain discussions of the present day about the Virgin Birth and other old dogmas which belong to the past, I feel how great the need is still of a real interest in the religion which builds up character, teaches brotherly love, and opens up to the seeker such a world of usefulness and the beauty of holiness. ~ Olympia Brown

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. ~ Gillian Flynn

Indeed, we can always better understand and appreciate a man's real character by the manner in which he conducts himself towards those who are the most nearly related to him, and by his transaction of the seemingly commonplace details of daily duty, than by his public exhibition of himself as an author, an orator, or a statesman. ~ Samuel Smiles

I love to share my problems with friends. They think I'm revealing my personal life, but I'm actually revealing theirs. What a person does with what you give reveals the real character of such person, and you can envision and predict a whole set of interactions through their life and based on such reactions. You can even predict a long their marriage will last, or what they will do when you need them. ~ Robin Sacredfire

In friendship similarity of character has more weight than kinship. ~ Cornelius Nepos

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life
the first twenty years of it
had about them something semi-fictitious. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics. ~ Zosia Mamet

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Non-violent resistance to evil is a quintessential element of the character of a real human being. If someone does wrong to me, I may be physically capable of breaking his jaw with one blow of my fist, but such violent reciprocation does not define the strength of my character as a real human being. If I succeed in resisting my limbic urge to do harm in return, then only can I be hailed as human being of real character. ~ Abhijit Naskar

If you play a real character who's famous and still alive, it makes things easier if you have the luck to have a good relationship with them. ~ Daniel Bruhl

This medium that we're working in - film and television - for an audience, it's like you live through these characters because it's things you can't do in real life. Places you're not prepared to go in real life as a decent human being, anyway. Because if you're a conscientious person, so you live kind of vicariously through these people. ~ Christian Cooke

I believe ability can get you to the top," says coach John Wooden, "but it takes character to keep you there.… It's so easy to … begin thinking you can just 'turn it on' automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you're there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, 'More than ability, they have character.' ~ Carol S. Dweck

When people come in the door and they have something, discovering and exploring the character is a real joy. ~ John Ridley

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same. ~ Isadora Duncan

Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I'm not a glamour boy, and I never get the girl. I like to play old people, because there's something to them. Did you ever see anybody under 30 with any real character or expression in his face? ~ Walter Brennan

Real character is formed in the midst of the battles of the soul. ~ Hugh B. Brown

Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides. ~ Alexander Smith

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own; and it is as full of good fellowship as a sugar maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects grave and gay ... For real company and friendship there is nothing, outside of the animal kingdom, that is comparable to a river. ~ Henry Van Dyke

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

the fact of not being understood by others had been my sole source of pride since my early youth, and I had not the slightest impulse to express myself in such a way that I might be understood. When I did try to clarify my thoughts and actions, I did so with no consideration whatsoever. I do not know whether or not this was because I wanted to understand myself. Such a motive is in accord with a person's real character and comes automatically to form a bridge between himself and others ~ Yukio Mishima

I think people are willing to take more of a risk on an indie film, about character, etc ... but at the same time, when I work on projects that are substantially bigger, in a way they do feel small. Even though the catering is way better and we actually have someone shooting with real film ... The budgets are bigger but the story still feels small, like an indie film. ~ Adam Driver

In these aspirations, much more than in deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man to be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us. Each ~ Victor Hugo

... As for me, I taught the lad the real character of a rifle; and well has he paid me for it. I have fought at his side in many a bloody scrimmage; and so long as I could hear the crack of his piece in one ear, and that of the Sagamore in the other, I knew no enemy was on my back. Winters and summers, nights and days, have we roved the wilderness in company, eating of the same dish, one sleeping while the other watched; and afore it shall be said that Uncas was taken to the torment, and I at hand - There is but a single ruler of us all, whatever maybe the color of the skin, and him I call to witness - that before the Mohican boy shall perish for the want of a friend, good faith shall depart the 'arth and 'Kill-deer' become as harmless as the tooting we'pon of the singer! ~ James Fenimore Cooper

When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life. ~ Victor Levin

Neither the Choice of his Friends, nor that of his Dishes, was the Result of Pride or Ostentation. He took Delight in appearing to be, what he actually was, and not in seeming to be what he was not; and by that Means, got a greater real Character than he actually aim'd at. ~ Voltaire

I really took it in-house. The Constantine character has a kind of flesh-and-blood practical look at things that would seem, other people would use the word, occult or spiritual. But here, demons are real. So for me it was more taking it from the film itself. I didn't really need to go outside the piece itself to inform me because the perspective on it, what the character does, was provided by the script. ~ Keanu Reeves

Clifford paints true-to-life characters with the same gritty touch as the best of Dennis Lehane. Straightforward and edgy, Lamentation gnaws with nail-biting tension on every page. A must-read for contemporary hardboiled mystery fans who appreciate the type of terse dialogue and real life conflicts and settings Elmore Leonard so richly brought to life. ~ Robert Dugoni

You read about somebody, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they really exist - the point is that you get into them like real characters. ~ John Hartford

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be. ~ Allan Massie

It's so easy to relax, to cut corners, to let down after you've reached your goal, and begin thinking you can just "turn it on" automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you're there. ~ John Wooden

I love playing real people. It's a huge challenge and responsibility which I take on board and which I relish. It also scares me to death. Give me a totally fictional character and I don't have the same sort of responsibility. If, though, I play Sigmund Freud or Robert Maxwell or whoever then there is a responsibility. ~ David Suchet

There is a scene in the movie where Astrid and Hiccup fly on Toothless's back toward the island of Berk. The animation is intensely real, from the waves on the sea to wisps of wind blowing in the characters' hair. The feeling I get watching that scene is why I fly - just for that feeling. ~ Craig Ferguson

If authority be required, let us appeal to Plutarch, the prince of ancient biographers. [Greek: Oute tais epiphanestatais praxesi pantos enesti daelosis aretaes ae kakias, alla pragma brachu pollakis, kai raema, kai paidia tis emphasin aethous epoiaesen mallon ae machai murionekroi, kai parataxeis ai megistai, kai poliorkiai poleon.] Nor is it always in the most distinguished atchievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles. ~ Samuel Johnson

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

My favorite artists from comics were early ones like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko who had a real heavy ink style. Captain America, co created by Jack Kirby, was a favorite of mine and I sometimes use an altered version of his costume on some of my characters. ~ Marcel Dzama

Danny Boyle has been a huge, has had a huge effect on me. His movies, early movies like Trainspotting and those movies. So I've always loved the energies of those movies. But also, that they are very focused on the characters. Cause it's not only gimmickery, it's not only about visuals. You feel a real need, a love for the main characters. So that's what I've always loved about watching movies myself. ~ Fredrik Bond

The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. ~ Carl Jung

The real revelation of a player's character is not in his social life but in how he plays. In my social life I can hide my real personality. ~ Arsene Wenger

I know there are a lot of people who like to get very involved in their characters, but I, personally, find it too involved. I just like to do it as a job - and it's my job to make it look real. ~ Henry Cavill

It's very important to keep the emotions grounded, to keep the characters in some real place. ~ Marc Webb

So, yes, the five years that we've been working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has evidenced a real deepening of all the characters, not only mine. ~ Rene Auberjonois

I think that people are going to find more interest in the human condition, especially with them being weaned on so much reality television. They want character driven stuff along with real violence. Cage fighting is very popular with the kids right now. They see and know what one punch can do to someone's face. You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore. ~ Dolph Lundgren

A German writer observes: The noblest characters only show themselves in their real light. All others act comedy with their fellow-men even unto the grave. ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

I haven't personally in my real life had many people close to me die, but my characters have, and I've had to live that as though it's real. And it can take a really big emotional toll on someone. ~ Nina Dobrev