Robert Towne Quotes

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person, and things happen to them, and then something big happens, and they realize something new.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character. I love being able to see a character go through something and to learn.

What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.

Keep your central character moving, discovering, learning.

I love the challenge of an entire year has gone by and how has that affected the character you're playing.

The character has to have some kind of arch. The character has to go through an event, and be changed by the human event.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

But he did say that the character would be on the sidelines in movies One and Two, and move into the middle with number Three, but I didn't realize he would move in with quite such a bang.

I'm trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.

I care more, and I think readers do also, for characters in a state of transformation.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.

As the character changes in the movie, it rubs off on the viewer, so the viewer also goes through that change.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.

Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?

As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.