Jared Harris Quotes

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

The one on Fresh Hell is a little easier, because we make it up. It's a strange kind of hybrid of the real me and... Well, obviously it's me standing there, and it's my voice and my face, but it's also kind of filtered through Harry Hannigan's take on the character, the one he's writing.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

To be true to a play, you can't add something that takes away from the author's intent.

There's a lovely freedom of will when you approach a character that no one has really come across before, because it is your own interpretation.

You have this certain about of responsibility to play a fictitious character and you have a script that's guiding you and the other information of the custom department's choices, and the set department, "Where are you," and all those other pieces of information but you have to cull from your imagination the answer to all the unasked questions. And with a real person, there's someone to get that information from, perhaps.

When you play a character, you bring yourself into the character. You get a chance to shine and show your translation for the character and her state of mind.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.

If you're a good actor, then you channel enough of yourself into the character so that you do get that other thing.

I consider myself a character actress, and that's working out. I'm getting chances to do things. I like the process - I don't want to pretend I'm something other than what I am.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.

I wasn't trying to do a play or do what Kevin Spacey did. I was trying to do my own thing with it.

In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.

I have always felt that if I am very personal and connected with what I myself am living, my writing will transcend ecclesial boundaries.

Once your writing is out there, you can't control how other people perceive it. All you can do is stand in your truth.

I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

for me the most fun of my career is to bring a little bit of irreverence to characters. And, you know, I don't think that the producers were expecting me to be as irreverent as I am.

One of my jobs as an actor, regardless of who I play - even if I'm playing a despicable character - is to make people think that that character could exist, that he's real, and the way to do that is to make him believable. He doesn't have to be likable or charming, but he just has to be believable. That is someone who I could see on a bus. That is someone who I could walk past in the street.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

The fun thing we get to do is mess around playing all sorts of different people. People that really existed, people that exist in a book - whom people love and have a specific idea of who they are, and you kind of have to work with that - or people that you can take a completely fresh look at.