Joe Meno Quotes

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

There is more meat and mileage in complex characters, like 'Running with Scissors.'

I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

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.

I've always wanted my characters to have more dimension and realistic cores than the ingenue material often provides. It's been a challenge.

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

'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.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few 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.

The characters, to me, in 'Homeland' are not one note in any way.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I think sometimes actors are drawn to good television because you have more time to sell it, you have more time to shape a character, and to tell a story, and that's really appealing.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.