Jane Jensen Quotes

Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I'm attracted to playing characters that have flaws.

I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It's too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.

If you know your characters well enough, you aren't trying to grasp for storylines. You're really thinking about their flaws and their passions and what they're chasing.

My favorite was 'The Secret Garden'. I loved it, and I think it's had a big influence on all of my characters. 'The Secret Garden' is about transgressions and imperfect people.

The characters I've played that I like the most are people that have a lot of obstacles. They have a lot of bad things going on. They're seeking to do something good amidst all the detritus around them, and they're aware of how badly they've screwed it up. That kind of self-awareness is tragic.

Everyone relates to the heroes - that's why they're the heroes. But I've realized there are just more layers to characters who have been through something dark.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

Some scars never heal. And he sounds like he has a lot of them.' 'But Christ had scars too, even on His risen Body. Wounds in this life become glory in the next.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I always play girls who are quite traumatised, or a plain girl, but I'm happy with that.

There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.

All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

When you have your heart broken for the first time, you gain depth.

I like playing characters who are fractured, broken. I find that more relatable, for some reason. I don't feel that I'm like that myself by nature, but there's just something that you can really grab hold of if people have a darkness in them, I think.

If I was to direct a movie about a super-confident guy, first of all I would hate that character. I can do a super-confident guy who crashes and burns and has to rebuild himself as somebody humble. But a super-confident guy that just gets more confident and gets the girl and the money and more success? That's not interesting.

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

I like roles of people who can overcome things because there's strength in that and an arc - and roles where they start in one place, and toward the end of the script they end up in a completely different place, so you've seen this growth and some humanity in the role.