Damon Lindelof Quotes

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

If you give a character room to breathe, they come alive.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

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

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there).

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

There are certain things that I know I don't want to do anymore. Playing out-and-out terrorists who terrorise people and don't actually move the conversation on are not worth doing. So that's probably another reason I don't go back to America, because a lot of it is like that. It's boring, dull, very lazy writing.

I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character's entire world.

Rather than just making a movie about video games, I wanted to start with the character and what the character was going through.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.