Toni Morrison Quotes

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character. I love being able to see a character go through something and to learn.

Are You Seeing Me? is written powerfully with both the heart and the head, and neither gives an inch. It's funny, moving and hugely insightful. Darren Groth puts the reader into the heads of Perry and Justine in a way that feels so true and so revealing that I think I've come away with a greater capacity for empathy. I didn't know a book could do that. We all need to spend some time inside this story.

[ This Is Us] is a character-driven dramedy, in which you will laugh. You may have to pull out your tissue box from time-to-time. But it will sort of reaffirm your desire to move forward in life. It's a very hopeful show.

With each movie [Twilight saga], we went in trying to explore that character a little deeper, or in a different sense. But, at the same time, there was a comfort in knowing that you know this person.

Keep your central character moving, discovering, learning.

It's fun to play somebody who's kind of struggling.

Each role, I feel like takes you on a different journey based on who that character is.

Becoming rich isn't as much about getting rich financially as about whom you become, in character and mind, to get rich.

The plot is very important because writers have to play fair with their readers, but no one would care about the plot if the character work wasn't there. So, basically every book I work on starts with me thinking not just about the bad thing that's going to happen, but how that bad thing is going to ripple through the community, the family of the victim, and the lives of the investigators. I am keenly aware when I'm working that the crimes I am writing about have happened to real people. I take that very seriously.

Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.

With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.

Without anyone's help, Darth Maul will only commit himself to his mistakes of the past. Every time we find this character, he is living in the past and in some cases he is living with the dead. This character is desperate and he needs Obi-Wan's help to move on.

I'm just looking for characters that continue to make me stretch and grow and learn more about the human condition.

Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It's like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

I like playing... I don't know. I think that's what was really exciting about playing Knives, too, from the beginning was that you get to kind of do both of that. She's almost like two different people, but that's what's cool about it, because I get to show her growth and that's the thing that's really cool about Knives, you get to really see her grow up from being meek and innocent and naïve at the beginning to this powerful girl who is going for what she really believes in and what she really wants.

I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful." But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible.— Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.

In the beginning of the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Edward is more enamored of himself than he is of anybody else. He's a very fine rabbit; he's been constructed incredibly well, and he has a wardrobe of amazing clothing. He's arrogant, and he doesn't care whether Abilene loves him or not. As the journey progresses, as he gets passed from hand to hand, he learns what it means to love. He gets more and more bedraggled, and his clothing is lost; yet he becomes finer in soul and heart than he was at the beginning of the journey.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

Well, it's kind of like that classic sort of trajectory in this kind of movie where there's conflict and they're estranged and they kind of grow to love each other but they don't show it. Then at the end - it's kind of like that. But I think the characters are more interesting than that.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

The most important beauty is not that with which you were born, but the beauty of character which grows through a woman's life and maybe never stops growing.

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.