Honore de Balzac Quotes

As much as you plan your career and plan your life, there are events that will change everything 180 degrees, I’ve had multiple events like that. I always wanted to be a doctor and now I’m in the theater business. But these defining moments in your life are really what builds your character.

You couple that with how I looked when I was younger, and growing up... The voice is not quite breaking. It's awful. No, I don't enjoy that at all. But that's one of the things people love and find so endearing about the Harry Potter series, and why they've lasted so long. Because people have grown up with us, and they care about the characters. They're not just some characters in the film, they're people you can relate to, and you care about, and you grew up with, and when they die in this film, people feel it!

When I was young, I was very selfish, now not any more.

Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?

On the surface, Wonder Boys seemed like such a departure from L.A. Confidential - it's funny, it's contemporary, and so on - and yet at a certain point, I had a feeling that reminded me how I felt when I was shooting L.A. Confidential. I analyzed it for a while, and thought about how emotionally involved I was with the characters. Then I realized that in both movies, there are three main male characters and one female, and all of them are struggling to figure out what they're doing with their lives, independent of each other.

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine... But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.

I do think it's important to be smiling and not make it all about business. You'll look back and regret it later, if you don't take advantage of your youth and your ability to travel. And it gives you something to pull from and inspiration to play your characters, and for your life and your development as a human being.

I often tease young people about their concern for how they look; more important is inner beauty - compassion, affection and respect.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

I think every woman character, every female character, has her own arc.

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.

It's interesting to play that [ Thomas in The Maze Runner], actually. The audience gets to see the character discover who he is, things that he never even knew about himself. I love that Thomas starts out as the newbie, as the 'Greenie', and the audience kind of experiences that through his perspective. It's really cool to watch him discover these leadership qualities that he has, and the way you approach it... I guess, just honestly. As honest as you can, really.

Each form of the acting is different. I think it keeps your mind active. TV, film and theater are different disciplines, as are independent films, opposed to studio films. There are differences in the size and the genre, or a period drama as opposed to a contemporary drama, or the types of characters.

The interesting thing about a lot of serialized television is that it's a blessing and curse. Smart writers really take their time in investing in backstories and characters. As a viewer, you have to invest in them and love them before you can chip away at what's going on more on a deeper level with secondary characters.

I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.

Strength and independence are always something that I'm drawn to in all my characters, no matter how different they are from one another.

Placing the blame is a bad habit, but taking the blame is a sure builder of character

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.

I love the supporting characters because you get to do more, to be totally honest. It's been sort of a theme with me. In Son of No One, I think I might have seven lines in the entire movie because everything is happening to my character.

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is the perfection of character.

In acting, you get to explore such an artistic side with different characters to research and learn and explore different things inside yourself and I do that anyway, so I might as well be doing something that I already do, as in a second nature to me, on film.