Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I'm the biggest Chekov fan - there's something that he does that not many other writers do.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.

There's a play that Chekhov wrote called 'Uncle Vanya,' and I when I was in school, I played Sonya, and sometimes people ask me if there was ever a role I could play again, that's definitely the role I would play again: Sonya in 'Uncle Vanya.'

I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.

Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.

'The Cherry Orchard' is a masterpiece, and there can never be too many adaptations.

I always thought Uncle Vanya could be a stoned masterpiece.

I choose grey characters, as I enjoy playing a human character. I don't shy away from showing the shortcomings of my characters.

Literature has become too psychological.

I think it helped that 'Fleabag' had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.

I was not wary of playing a mother on screen but wasn't sure if I could do justice to it. Would I be able to showcase that kind of overpowering love without being a 'real' mother?

I'm not very good at depicting the characters' psychology on the page.

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

The character, as written on the page, is just a blueprint for a human being.

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

I started with [Leo] Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs.

I love playing confused, broken characters.

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

Action film is really easy to do, you just get in a car and smash through things and it's called action. The real key is what happens between the action when it's quiet. Loud is easy. Quiet, real hard.

When you play a character that is so emotionally closed there are times when you ask yourself if you are doing enough and if it's reading. That is where you have a director, who is the barometer of what you are doing.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

The more you spend time with a character, the more you see different nuances of that character.