Raphael Bob-Waksberg Quotes

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

Of course I know my characters are unlikable sometimes or have prejudices. It's not as if I'm thinking they're so endearing all the time. I guess it's much more interesting to me to write someone who is a combination of good and bad qualities because that's what people are like in real life.

I think we all change each other's paths. I don't know which law idea that is in physics, but I don't think any of us can live without affecting one another.

I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'

We play many emotions in our careers, emotions that in real life we would perform just once. For example, my character has died in about 10 films, so you have to keep searching for different ways to do it!

If the role is challenging enough, I don't see why I shouldn't play an older man or a father figure. It is not about playing what you are in real life. We are called actors for a reason!

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

The thing with '24' is that because it moves so much, it's a challenge, and sometimes things get revealed about these characters as you go.

I believe that every character is a setting, a world with moving parts, and on the other hand, every setting is, in fact, a character - a living breathing thing with personality and backstory. The way stories come to life, at least for me, is when these elements commune in relationship to one another.

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

Real life is never black and white why must the movies be?

I'm not a trained actor. I have neither read acting books nor gone to acting school. But I have certain fundamentals on how I approach a character; the basic skeleton of my preparation is based on observations from real life.

We are trying to push the envelope with a lot of characters in 'Brothers.' We are going out of the way and being honest to our roles.

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

For one change always leaves a dovetail into which another will fit.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.