Jeff Lemire Quotes

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

It's hard to actually take details from your personal life and apply them a scene because, as much as you can identify with a feeling, you just get muddled. As soon as you start bringing your own stuff in, it's like, 'No, that's not right.' You're playing a different person. You can relate, but you have to leave that stuff at the door.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

It's wonderful when you can play a character that pulls all sorts of strings inside of you and fills you emotionally.

A big part of the fun of working on Superman has been coming up with new characters and concepts to toss in, helping to design their costumes, things like that. And I spent ages coming up with the name 'Fortress of Solidarity,' so I want to get as much use out of it as I can!

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

It was a big deal to me to play characters and feel things and connect to somebody in a fake world.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

I love the characters I've had the opportunity to play.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

For me, writing the 'X-Men' was easy - is easy. I know these people, they're my friends.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

Playing interesting characters makes me feel alive.

I like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.

While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, 'The Lemon Orchard' is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense.

In terms of the character itself, I can't really say that I find anything really difficult. I enjoy the character so much I don't perceive difficulty in trying to be him. It's just a matter of how do we get there.

One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

One of the reasons I began to write was because I wanted stories for my children where the characters spoke as they did and had similar life experiences.

I was worried for a while that it was some sort of reflection of me that all I seemed to be getting were these characters that were a tad bit loony. But I love it. Those are the most fun characters to play!

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

I'm not saying that I am all of my characters, but for me to bring a character to life, you've got to be able to find your own truth.