Billy West Quotes

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

Mercy Watson was a character that had been in my head for a long time.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

It's always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that's got emotion.

The acting is more of a secondary thing for me now. I will be in it, if I'm the best man for the job, but it really is about creating characters and shows.

Every character I've had in my act - none of them have a similar creation story. I actually thought up Peanut and designed him in my head. I described him to a woman that was making soft puppets and she drew up some sketches. And the character came to be just because he popped into my head.

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

My job, and what I've taken such joy in, is the craft of acting and of creating dynamic and authentic characters, and then finding a way to build them within the confines and with the support of the worlds that I've found myself.

I'm an actor, I created the character myself originally. I do tell the fans I appreciate that they think he's real. It all finally comes down to the writers who really got the character and wrote so many memorable lines.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

I love rehearsals and I love creating a character, sticking with it until you have something to tell. It's always different though. Sometimes a director will tell you from day one what they want. Then you throw in your idea.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

I don't do all the background and the worldbuilding before I start the story. What I do is I work out the bare minimum I need to start the story, and often that really is a bare minimum - it's a character in a situation, and I know nothing about the character, I know nothing about the situation, and then I think about it for a long time, and make notes about where I think the story is going to go and so on, but I don't really make notes to do with the background or the magic system or the world.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

You basically go in animation and it's all in the imagination. There aren't even pictures to look at. You usually go in there and work with whoever the director is to create this voice and this character.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

It's almost a work-shopping process to create the characters with the actors.

Every person has contributed to me as a human, but a lot of the characters I do are ones I created.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.