George Eliot Quotes

I like conflict, drama's conflict and if you don't have that in the character it's really not a worthwhile role to play for me.

My job as a dramatist is to find out where these characters want to go, and make it as hard as possible for them to get there.

And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

The vampires in the 'VAMPS' series judge each other as harshly as they judge humans, and basically, vampires don't get along very well. So you've got a culture that's from cradle to grave like the worst high school you've ever been in.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction.

Really a bad guy is more interesting, dramatically, than the good guy.

When you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.

There ain't no "baby mama drama" up in this Vortex, homie!

That's what acting is, it's exploring conflict.

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.

When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.

You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

I know a lot of people who say, "I reluctantly watched the first episode because I don't really like zombies and that stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised by the characters and the drama of it all." I think that's what keeps people coming back and brings new watchers to the show. What the show does is cross many, many different viewerships.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace?

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

The great thing about working on a genre show is that you can basically have a season finale where every character is left destroyed, and then hit the reset button and come back for the next season.