Carl Hiaasen Quotes

I just like a good story. I want the story to be good and I want the character to be different than the last one I played. That's not always possible, but that's what I want.

I realized there's a difference between creating a character and sustaining a character. The challenge that comes with sustaining a character is that you have this sudden impulse to think about all the things the audience liked.

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.

Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

As an actor, I like as much time with the material as possible and given the opportunity, time spent with the other actors in the scene. But that is a rare luxury in working in any TV series.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

I think that each character has fascinated and interested me enough to want to play him.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.

A lot of times, scripts are written so the character is all one way. Even with 'Bringing Out the Dead,' the character was written a little more generic.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

The action stuff is only good if you get the character stuff in there as well. Sometimes that get lost in amongst all the trying to make stuff blow up.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.

The life of a character doesn't just exist between action and cut.