George V. Higgins Quotes

I think the ultimate goal is that when we're off-stage, we know everything our character is thinking. Hopefully when we are on-stage, our thoughts are our character's thoughts because we really know that much about them.

I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.

For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

I think that is what you want to do as a cinemagoer - to experience something fully. Some things don't let you experience them fully. It may be your own preordained prejudice where you can't experience them fully. But when you come out of the cinema having felt, thought, and experienced your way through two hours, that is a really cool thing.

At the end of the day, if you don't identify with the main characters, no television show will work.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

I know that I've had a very fortunate life, but also I think my job as an actor is to connect emotionally to human beings.

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.

The ability to get inside your character's head in a graphic novel is really fun and useful because one, you can really define the character's voice and two, it's a way easier way to convey what the character's thinking by actually laying out what he's thinking.

When I'm putting the character together I try to find music that I think fits the character.

Film is about what you are thinking. It's about what's inside.

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work.

If people spend two hours thinking about the direction of their own lives and can relate to the stories they see on screen, to me that's a success.

When I'm about to blow the candles on my birthday cake and everybody is telling me I must make a wish, I just go into a tailspin. I'm thinking: what do I wish?, and I just can't seem to think about anything. Then I close my eyes, take a deep breath and there comes my wish. I don't know how to explain what goes on inside of me, but that's what happens: breathing is the key to understand what's really important to me.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

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