Maria Semple Quotes

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I'm trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

In TV, you may think your character's one thing for two episodes, and then the third episode it could be something different.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Usually when you have a sequel, the character always stays the same and that's true basically of 'Rocky III,' 'IV' and 'V.' He didn't really change.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

The Duffers like that; they like watching their characters grow.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always evolving.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.