Mia Wasikowska Quotes

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.

It would be hard to play a character you don't like - for me anyway - or can't find something in them to like.

I think there has to be an empathic strike between the reader and the protagonist. There has to be something said or known that connects the reader to this person you're going to ride through the story with.

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

Emotional information is very, very rich in influence. You're giving somebody something to connect with, to see themselves in.

Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.

I think there's a bit of me in every character. Basically it just depends on what happens with the character.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.

I don't think you have to like a character, but if you can understand why they do what they do, or the position they're in or why they make certain choices, then you can get behind them.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

I have a lot of compassion for human beings in life experiences, so I allow myself to feel what these characters are feeling and don't have a problem accepting that.

I tend to absorb a lot of what other people are feeling.

I look for characters that speak to something in me.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.