Peter Mayhew Quotes

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

There were certain things that I tried to do on 'Karamchand.' Initially, they were hated, but eventually everyone loved the characterization.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always evolving.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

My life needed to be saved. Not just Foxy. That's my character. That's my work. Inga is a person.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

I remember always feeling lucky with Zoey on 'Nurse Jackie' that... she was new at the very beginning. So that gave her everywhere to go.