Manuel Puig Quotes

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.

When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.

Every character, for me, is a new discovery.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

I like to take a character and develop it.

What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way - they make you look at the world in a different way.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

If you can find a way your character moves, you know more about your character than you'd ever dream.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

Sometimes the director will want you to write about the character, sometimes he'll want you to live in the location that the character is from or something like that, but I don't usually make a lot of notes or anything like that.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.