Bill Watterson Quotes

There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.

It's funny: it takes a while to really get your character. It's impossible to do it on the first day. That's the same way in films; if you start shooting a film, maybe a couple weeks in, you're like, "Ah! Now I think I really get him."

But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason.

I do just love the characters in sci-fi, but not necessarily the fact that it's sci-fi.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others' eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is often very exciting, when characters meet - out of their encounters, unanticipated stories can spring.

For me, with any character, there are different ways that you approach understanding him, and in this film in particular, because I had the novel to refer to. It's always really helpful to have all of that information and all of those hundreds more words which give you an idea into the background and your character and all.

I try to have a balance of things you like and things you don't like about a character. But once you start that, all these scripts are like, "You play the douchebag friend of Ashton Kutcher." It's all these characters that are overconfident or hyper-masculine.

You kind of worry for the characters in a way that you don't normally in sci-fi, because sci-fi tends to be about the ideas, and this is about people.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

Writers get to know me very well. It always serves me in the end because I feel I have a deeper understanding of the character and sometimes they really like my ideas and they use them.

When you're training as an actor, a lot of the big work you're learning is to treat fictional characters like real people. You don't have the problem of discovering a backstory with real people, but there's always a mystery which is common to both fictional and factual characters. They are never quite the person you think they are.

I've been doing It's Aways Sunny for 12 years, and so I have this cable sensibility. When I read the Grinder script, I was like "this is edgy," which is great, but in a different way from Arrested Development. I feel like the characters are a little more relatable, so maybe that's the difference.

I'm generally not a social dramatist or comedy writer. My interests have always been more in psychological stories or personal relations and comic ideas.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

There are a few pretty fundamental differences. In voice acting, if you are doing game recording, for the most part you are going to be by yourself in a studio. With game voice acting you are constructing everything for yourself pretty much. You're thinking about what the other characters could be doing, trying to imagine the scene, you're constructing the entire environment for yourself.

Circumstances don't create character. They reveal character.

I liked "Superman/Batman: The Search for Kryptonite" because I really enjoyed the interaction between those two characters.

I start to get fixated on a story and a character and an idea, and at a certain point, I really want to do it. It's a compulsion to explore a specific thing, as opposed to a compulsion to direct, generally speaking.

Character is what someone does, much more than who they are. I can be sarcastic or I can be fearful, but it doesn't really matter until there's a story - until someone comes in and holds us hostage.

The recipe for any character is always very interesting, as far as what doses of certain qualities you want.

Cheers was one of the first shows where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters.

You can never know enough about your characters

'Fringe' is essentially a love story, so the scenes where Walter had close connection with Peter, but also with Anna's character or Jasika's character, were very special to me.