Kurt Busiek Quotes

What stories are new? All types of all characters march through all fables.

I often played the nerdy friend or the goofy sidekick or the sort of naïve movie character in some ways.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them.

I love the process of auditioning and having the chance to play a million different characters in one week - it's great.

If I can look at each character that I am given and create them in a different way from the last role, I'm happy.

I'd say, go ahead, shoot your shot. More power to ya if you can come up with a different angle on the character.

I'm drawn to real-life characters. A lot of the characters I play, I've had in me since second grade. I've been dragging them around my entire life, and then sometimes I marry them with different people. But seldom have I really come up with a new character. In my head it's like, "I'll pull that person out that I've been doing since sixth grade and see where they're at right now.".

An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.

I'm very deliberate and I love Excel spreadsheets and I love five-year plans and all that. So it felt really fun to play someone so incredibly different from myself.

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

I feel like they're different creatures, live and in the studio, but that's what makes it so interesting to me. If they didn't have any different shadings or colors, you might as well be a hologram or something.

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

The world is a bundle of hay, Mankind are the asses that pull, Each tugs in a different way And the greatest of all is John Bull!

Walt Kelly was much more interested in allegory and politics, and I'm much more interested in metaphors and myth.

You can compare Holmes and Watson to great Shakespearean characters, in a way. They've been played by hundreds of actors over the years, and each one is a different interpretation - the source material can take that form of interpretation.

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.

I like to be in control of my body. Also, I love getting into character and exploring a different aspect of who I am.

I've always enjoyed playing a little left of center characters. Otherwise I'd be on a soap opera.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

I'm such a huge fan of television and what's happening in television, right now. You are able to visit characters and visit a story, week to week, push things in a different way than you can in a film, and you are able to go deeper, simply because you have more time. I'm just excited to do that. It's always good to do new things.

I think you have to be flexible above all as an actor; different characters have different demands, actors that you work with are different in their approach, or how you get along or don't get along with them.

Taking on an iconic character is difficult, sure, people associate different actors with a character that you're playing, but there's something in rehearsing and developing a new character.

The main thing about improvising is listening so if something happens that wasn't expected and you know your character, you know what has to happen in this scene, you can react to that in a way that's honest and it might take you in a different direction to go to the same place.