Colm Toibin Quotes

When you watch it, you're like, Wow. I look like that. But it doesn't feel like that at all. It was about communicating with Gale Harold and getting across what I wanted to say about the character.

Often you find the character through the things they say. How they talk about other people, how they describe themselves - which is very rare.

Dialogue is not always the best way to show emotion, to show your thought process, or to reveal yourself, as a character.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'

It's very hard to write a story with only one character. This is because readers want to see your protagonist interacting with others. We come to know people through their interpersonal relations. Even Jack London, in his classic short story 'To Build A Fire,' gave his lone Arctic explorer a dog so that the character would have someone to talk to.

I treat any scene the same - dialogue, action - you're still creating something in character. It's all acting, fighting.

Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

When you're crafting a character, it's good to have a lot of influences.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

The actor always must be in the scene, not above the scene. To communicate any larger ideas is my problem; it's how the narrative is constructed and directed that hopefully does it.

Acting and writing go together. Actors write because they love words and becoming other people - we love to escape into other characters.

You have to examine a scene on the page first. Then you get into the basics of acting: Who are you? Who are you talking to? How do you feel about that person?

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

My job as an actor is to cover and expose in varying allowance that - so that the audience can peek through the window to the people I create.

You can write and write, but if you don't have someone who can nail that character, it's never going to live.