Eudora Welty Quotes

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.

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 what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

I'm not very good at depicting the characters' psychology on the page.

Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.

Whatever character you play, whatever film it is, whatever story it is, for me, in my training it's always something that gives you a layered character, it's understanding the secret of that character, and so whatever comes up as "Oh, I thought that person was that," you are always carrying that within you. So actually what you're playing all the way through is both and it's just what comes out in the scene or the circumstance.

I choose to write characters from the inside because I feel like that's the way I'm gonna get the most honest version of them.

I never actually do rehearsals. That's one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I'll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.

I would say plotting is the most difficult thing for me. Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, "Hey, people want to find out what's going to happen next, they don't want to listen to you spout off about this or that person." But I think even the bad guy deserves to tell his side of the story.

Your characters should be as smart as you are, if not smarter.

You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character.

But when you get to know a character so well, you start to have insights that you can't show because you're confined to your script of your hit show.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

The real challenge of acting for me, I suppose, is just getting to know a character very, very well and just applying what I know about them to every single scene. That's what it can be broken down to.

As an actor I can sort of smell a duff note, that isn't full of that much conviction. My worst thing with directors is when I know more than them about the character.