Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing — the characters, the story, the words, the themes — and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

'Rozabal' was theological while 'Chanakya' is political. Unlike 'Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of 'Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.

I like writing historical fiction.

Acting is so exciting to me. It's a thrill; otherwise I wouldn't do it. Not to be hokey, but I think life is definitely worth living, whether you're working or not. For an actor, the character is the thing... it doesn't matter what medium you're in. as long as you have something to do.

I was always in love with film and becoming a character and playing something else, and nobody ever told me no, so I just followed it, and here I am, having a ton of fun.

If the character is true, the movie will fall into place. Or at least that's what you hope.

There's such a thing as being a little too perfect - a little too shiny. I know I prefer things that have room to breathe and give you a story, a world, in which you have the room to move around.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

If you do a character, always make the character with a big question mark. Even if the character is very enigmatic and all over the place, make him always with a question mark, because if you turn a question mark upside down, like they do in South America in Spanish, then it becomes a hook.

When you encounter sophistication in the creation of a female character, you thank the writers and you claim it.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.

That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story