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 always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films – although I think they do have plots – but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from ‘point a’ to ‘point b,’ just so that you can end up at ‘point c.’ They are just sort of stick characters. That’s just not interesting to me.
I’m personally not terribly interested in designing wholesome characters, so I don’t have many variations to offer.
Moby Dick – that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that’s how my book begins, too, but I hadn’t noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.
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.
One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another’s worlds, preventing gridlock.
Writing is a solitary endeavor, but not a lonely one. When you write, your world is populated by the characters you invent, and you feel those people filling your life.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.
I’m not very good at depicting the characters’ psychology on the page.
I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.
I am the common man. I’m polite, I love my family and I play by the rules. And sometimes I get pushed around. That’s my lifestyle, and that’s what I try to bring to characters.
What I love about ‘The Office’ is the fast pace and the zaniness of those characters.
When I started comedy, I was a big Eddie Murphy fan. I thought if you did stand-up, you were supposed to know how to act, write, and host. I thought it was all one thing. That’s why it doesn’t feel like I’m transitioning to acting: because in my stand-up, I do characters all the time.
My main characters are the most sunny, happy, optimistic, loving creatures on the face of the Earth. I couldn’t be happier that’s where I start. I can put as many flawed people in the dog’s world as I like, but the dog doesn’t care. Dog doesn’t judge. Dog doesn’t dislike. Dog loves. That’s not so bad.
I don’t think he’s permanently affected me except in the sense that I miss him. I miss being him. Or trying to be him. He is one of a gallery of characters that have had an impact on my career and therefore my life.
In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there’s no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.
‘Boomerang!’ I love that movie just because of Halle Berry, Robin Givens, Eddie Murphy, Grace Jones and Eartha Kitt. There were so many characters. As an actress, to see African-American actors be so diverse was different from what I was used to seeing.
Television’s so quick, and there’s so many other fun elements to it, but you don’t get such good scripts and the time to really make much more three dimensional characters.
I do not speak through my characters; it’s not a ventriloquist act.
I’m a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.
‘The Oath’ seems like the perfect project for me, coming off the back of a big-scale adventure film like ‘Everest.’ I want to delve into an intimate, dark and psychological world where the characters are claustrophobic.
It’s just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.
I always liked strange characters.
I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.
I love thinking of cartoon characters feeling really real feelings. And I love to do that, not just as a fan, but as a creator, so if people want to look for those levels, they’re actually there.
I think that I’ve always been attracted to characters who are positive and come from a very innocent place. I think there’s a lot of room for discovery in these characters, and that’s something I always have fun playing.
I always gravitate towards characters that are so opposite of me.
I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.
It is very grand and sumptuous and awesome to look at but it was really about the characters for me.
I always think it’s really nice to see characters band together and fight for what they all believe in.
The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.
Something that I really enjoy doing is creating and being a part of very different characters and very different projects.
Aaron Echolls is one of the best characters that I’ve ever played.
If I’ve been an architect of my own career in any fashion, one thing that I’ve attempted to do is not get typecast, in order to be able to play all different kind of characters. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years.
All of the Marvel characters have flaws to them; all of them have a deep humanity to them.
I did a guest appearance on ‘Entourage.’ That was horrible, because I’m used to analysing the characters, working with all the details… and they said, ‘No no no, walk and talk, walk and talk! It’s energy energy energy!’ – so it didn’t quite suit me.
If fans consider me a heartthrob, I think it has more to do with the kind of characters that I have played.
The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They’ll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.
I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.
I don’t understand labels. I don’t need anybody to tell me I’m Latina or black or anything else. I’ve played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening.
The point of my explanation is I’m very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out – but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.
To me, beauty is a commodity and that’s the way it’s treated in my books. It has power, and though that power is limited, some characters understand that better than others.
To be a great creator, you have to be vulnerable. You’re creating characters that have a little bit of yourself in them… And you want to know it’s a safe environment for that.
There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.
It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they’re driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they’d sound ludicrous!
It’s also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.
The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.
You can fake your age or mask it, but the passion that moves the characters has to be real.
I love ‘Trading Places,’ but ‘Coming to America’ has one of the things I like to do – I like the multiple characters.
Normally, we see characters that have God complexes. How interesting, I thought, it would be to capitalize on that. And say, OK, well fine, you have a God complex, well this person has a Satan complex. And the doctor chooses to treat him scientifically.
