Nick Harkaway Quotes

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

I think initially we wanted to use the first letter of the character's name. We thought S was perfect.

There are writers for whom names mean nothing; everybody could be called John and Elizabeth, and the writing would be just as good. A name, of course, is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.

I thought I would keep the first name Susan and change the last name but I picked up this book and as I opened it the lead character in it was called Morgan Brittany.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

More attention and thought goes into naming a character in 'Call Of Duty' than all the work that can go into certain movies. Blood and sweat and tears go into figuring out the names because they are so important. The call signs say a lot about you. The brotherhood that's evoked by the name is quite profound.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.

We don't really get to see gay characters who are completely open with their sexuality, but it doesn't define who they are.

I am pretty sure I will never get a better character name than Japonica Fenway.

What is immutable about Sherlock Holmes? He favors reason over emotion, but actually underneath that, there is a lot of emotion going on. You can't suddenly make him ordinary because he would hate that. He's not suddenly going to be somebody else.

A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.

I was going to fight vampires, and my name wasn't Buffy--I was so screwed.

Sometimes I aid into the confusion by having my character's name be my name.

For me, playing a vampire isn't about the fact that they're a vampire, it's about who they are specifically.

There’s an old writing rule that says ‘Don’t have two character names start with the same letter’, but I knew at the beginning that I was going to have more than 26 characters, so I was in trouble there. Ultimately it comes down to what sounds right. And I struggle with that, finding the right name for a character. If I can’t find the right name I don’t know who the character is and I can’t proceed.

[Producers] promised me they wouldn't do that sort of "defining nature of my character is that Laurel is Latina [in How to Get Away with Murder] ." It has nothing to do with that. She just happens to be a Latina.

It's the way I feel about acting. That we are given clues by a writer about someone's essence or persona and it's our job to try to figure out which of those clues are true, which of clues we decide to follow and which of those clues we think are red herrings, or only in the way another character thinks of that character.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

Anne Shirley. Anne with an "e.

Those characters are forever searchingeven if we're not watching them, they're out there, in some dimension. Mulder and Scully are still doing their thing, because that's their nature.

There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context.

Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.