Nick Kroll Quotes

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

There are a lot of techniques for developing a character.

To create a fully formed character full of life, struggle, and humanity is tough.

What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn't feel like fiction.

For me, playing a really bad character is about figuring out what brought the person to where we need him.

I think it's really important, when you're redefining a character [ Spider-Man], for the audience to experience things that they haven't experienced, from the ground up. I wanted to build a character. I feel like point of view is a really crucial thing in the story, and that you need to build up the emotional building blocks, so that you can experience all the other emotions in a very specific way, rather than just experiencing it in an intellectual way.

The character, as written on the page, is just a blueprint for a human being.

I don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.

With any character, I try to focus more on who the character is and how they got to be who they are.

Every character I've had in my act - none of them have a similar creation story. I actually thought up Peanut and designed him in my head. I described him to a woman that was making soft puppets and she drew up some sketches. And the character came to be just because he popped into my head.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

One thing that I don't think I do is play characters. Once you start claiming that you can do something that you're not, you're crazy. I think scripts can really surprise you. You go, "Wow, I did not know that that response could come from me. I did not know that I had that in me." And so, the process of making the movie is just finding that and digging a little deeper.

You really have to work hard to create a three-dimensional character. You have to rehearse and explore and take your time. You can't just memorize your lines and do it on the fly.

I usually make up stories for my kids.I like to tell them stories and make up any kind of crazy to involve them in characters. The kind of fairytales I don't like are the ones with happy endings, where there's just good and evil and things are perfect. I think when there's a good story for children it has a moral tale, so that's what I try to teach my kids.

I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.

I like to make all my characters interesting. Be they male, female or creatures unknown.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

I try to be true to the characters that I've created and sometimes I disagree with them, but their opinions about the story and the characters really matter to me.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

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