Ben Kingsley Quotes

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

If your dream is to tell stories, interesting stories, play interesting people, that's the bottom line. The people that I play have to be extraordinary.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

The challenge is to stay true to the characters while also having them be entertaining every day, because it turns out that just watching someone be true to themselves isn't that rad to watch.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.

Finding the voice of a character, no matter who it is - from Black Widow to Han Solo - is the first and most important hurdle for me to cross in any work of fiction.

I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.

I like to stay within the zone of one character. It would disturb me to break away and go into an entirely different territory.

I had to push exposition through dialogue, which is really, really hard for an actor do.

I love characters songs and I love to fit into a story. I love singing through a character's journey.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.