Michael Douglas Quotes

The most fascinating powers don't mean a thing if the guy's poorly motivated or dull, and the most generic powers won't hurt a well-motivated character. Personality and motivation are what make Magneto, Magneto and not Cosmic Boy. The powers work for him, but it's his motivation that makes him the character he is.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

As actors, we want to choose somebody who has conflicts. I can't be always playing the girl next door. What's the challenge in that?

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

I try to distinguish my characters from each other.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

I'm tired of playing freaking cha-chas, the sassy CIA agent, the best friend homegirl. I'm tired of that!

A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

The producers felt that 24 would be good for the audience, to really get to know who these 12 and 12 are.

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

The scene is never really about moving the story forward on 'Breaking Bad.' That's the functional veneer of the scene, but it's always about what's going on with the characters.

Dialogue is something I don't get a lot of on 'Game of Thrones.'