Jack Lemmon Quotes

Great success always comes at the risk of enormous failure.

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.

You have to find something you relate to in every character.

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.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.

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.

Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.

I love finding the vulnerability in characters. There's truth there. There's beauty in vulnerability.

If you look at a character as a mountain over there that you have to climb, then I think you've lost 50 percent of the air.

I put the sweat of my life into this project, and if it's a failure, I'll leave the country and never come back.

Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.

It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence.

And one of the things that's interesting about how they're doing the show is that the audience almost knows more than the characters do in some of these scenes, and the extent of that is unique. So it's grown into a different show in a way. It's sort of grown into a different experience watching it.

And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.

If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book - not what they look like that's not very important - what people look like is not about their character. You have to describe the shape they leave in the world, how they react to things, what effect they have on people and you do that by telling their story.

What interests me when I'm writing is being able to crawl into a character's head and speak from his or her mouth. It's not pulling the strings on a marionette, it's not playing ventriloquist, and it's not mimicry. It's about inhabiting a character, and, at the same time, being totally unaware of what you've become.

There is nothing in the world that does not speak to us. Everything and everybody reveals its own nature, character and secrets continuously. The more open our inner senses, the more we understand the voice of everything.

You can never know enough about your characters

I always prefer the character moments. For me, personally, whether I'm shooting the gun or not shooting the gun, I really don't care. I'm the guy who's like, "Whatever you want me to do." But, I really get excited about the character moments that are steeped in emotion when the stakes are high.

We as actors doubt up until the last minute that we can be this person. So everything matters, the more work you do, you get in touch with who the character is.

You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

As an actor, I usually have to find something to love about my character in order to play her.