Kevin Feige Quotes

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

In TV and movies, you kill yourself spending all this time to think up the symbolism or what if that deer that runs across your hero's path somehow conveys what's going on inside your hero's head? When a lot of times, you just want to hear what he's thinking.

More often than not, a hero’s most epic battle is the one you never see; it’s the battle that goes on within him or herself.

I do a lot with characters' sense of identity. I also like challenging stereotypes, gender roles, things like that. Give me a stereotype or a genre expectation and the first thing I want to do is stand it on its head. In the Nightrunner books I wanted to see if I could create a believable gay hero, one who wasn't someone's sidekick or a victim.

Apart from a couple that were just having fun with the concept and making fun of [Donald] Trump - like the one we did with Keegan Michael-Key - they really are little hero narratives. The whole "Save the Day" - it's called that, specifically, for a reason - ethos is there is this heroic act called voting. And the world is scary, and things are overwhelming, and there's a lot at stake.

In designing Supergirl, I wanted to embrace the past but more importantly, thrust her into the street-style action hero of today.

A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

A lot of characters now on TV have moved into being anti-heroes, but I wanted to be the hero.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

I've done TV, but never where you're given this much time to live with a character, to study the tone and hone it and repair stuff, to go back and watch old episodes and go, "Oh no, that's a misstep. That's a victory. I should do more of that, less of that."

When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

Here are examples of real women who have done real things: good, bad, and in between. We're expanding not just the definition of the female or feminine hero, but also villains and more complex, nuanced female characters. Too often I hear men say, "I don't know how to write women." Here you go, here are five incredible women you can use to inspire your own stories.

I love to watch those old movies on late-night television, particularly when a couple get up from a champagne dinner in a posh restaurant and the hero hands the waiter $3. But the best part is when he says, "Keep the change."

But, as an actress, you don't want to run into these scenes, willy-nilly. The couple that I did do were important for the character and essential to the plot, to show what was actually going on between each character. It is great to be able to have that, and to be able to say certain things and have certain passions.

A good story is always a journey. It is about taking the journey, the people the hero meets along the way and how they change him or her. All stories are journeys. They don't have to be shocking or outrageous: they simply have to be interesting.

It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That's a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

I think that by now, in the very beginning when I first joined the show, General Landry was like a new kid in school. I was coming into a situation I didn't really know much about, and now, after a couple of years, the character's kind of mellowed and gotten comfortable working at the command center and very comfortable with his troops. What they always do with these shows is they always leave them open-ended. The SG-1 franchise has been so successful for the network, that they always want to keep it open, an option to do it again in some way, whether that's a movie or a series, or whatever.

I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

You turned into a hero when I wasn't watching.

When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads... I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.

As an actor you always wanna protect your character. You wanna make them loveable, likeable. You wanna make them strong, you want them to be the hero, you want them to always be right.