Colm Meaney Quotes

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

Every time I talk about 'The Shield' I kind of talk about it from three perspectives, as if I'm three people, because I'm a fan of the show. I'm in love with all the other characters and their journeys and their work. But then, as an actor, I love getting this kind of rich material and having to do it. As my character, did my journey finish?

I try mainly to just focus on character and what my character's point of view is, with each person, and try to figure out story.

'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.

A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.

The bedrock of 'Being Human' has to be characters. I would hope that even if suddenly we had a huge budget per episode, the foundation of the show, and the thing that actually makes it what it is, is character.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.