Mark Gatiss Quotes

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

There are so few shows that are willing to take risks with their characters in the way that 'Homeland' does. And yet, the audience still comes back and loves those characters.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

I want to do interesting characters with depth, which are a part of great stories. In fact, if the character is quirky and challenging, that's even better.

I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

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.

Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.

Nice characters are boring!

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

I don't think I've seen that sort of character in a long time in this genre because again, there was a time when you could have quirky, strange characters that you grew to love, you didn't quite understand, you know, and then all of a sudden they became almost cardboard cutouts for awhile. You kind of know the guy, what his deal is - this guy's hard to figure out. He has some strange habits, but, you learn to love him and you discover more about him, where it comes from.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

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

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

Quite honestly, I think that if you are making a lot of television programs with a central character, then ultimately it can become boring if you know nothing about them. I personally want to know, or get to know, things about a character. It doesn't mean to say that they still can't have a certain mystery about them.

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.

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

Every actor wants to have a character that changes, that has some kind of movement, that gets from point A to point B, that doesn't just supply one note.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

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

As for dream roles, they usually just speak to you. I just crave complex characters.

I like complicated characters.