Character Balance Quotes

Actors usually feel skeptical about double hero films because one character might overshadow the other, but the late scriptwriter K. Subash has penned 'Karuppu Raja Vella Raja' in such a way that Vishal and I have equal scope in the film.

In the past, TSR and now Wizards of the Coast have asked me to do game stats for my characters, and I'm never comfortable doing that. It's all relative after all.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

I know that all cops are not sterling characters. But you have to have someone to root for. I balance it with rotten cops who will take a bribe, who will beat somebody up.

I'd been concerned all along that the character of the president in the West Wing pilot would throw the ensemble out of whack, that that character would simply take up all the oxygen in a room. I wanted to hold off bringing this character in until the last possible moment.

I'm a little worried about a Batman versus Superman movie just because it's... I just think it's really tough to pull off. I'm very excited about seeing it, but I think it's really tough to balance those two characters in the same movie.

I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. I don't feel like that's my specialty.

Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.

Batman and Superman are very different characters but they're both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.

I didn't want to just do a show where my character stood out and other characters were flat or one-to-two-dimensional. I wanted everybody to have meat.

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

Hitman does well and it certainly does well enough to survive, but at the same time I don't want to involve the character into the DC Universe even if it meant more sales, to the point where we sort of upset the balance that we have at the moment.

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

I think in telling a good story there has to be ups and downs with any character, and you can't just have everything go swimmingly and you can't just have characters who are supposed to be in a romantic relationship just getting into an argument every episode.

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

Alpha heroes, even uberalpha heroes, still win readers' hearts. I like a masterful hero myself, but I also enjoy the idea that sometimes the heroine can be in charge.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

If you have an extreme character, you need normal characters to contrast them. Sherlock Holmes certainly needed a Dr. Watson. And Pippi Longstocking, who supposedly inspired Lisbeth Salander, needed Tommy and Annika, the normal middle-class neighbors.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.

Hollywood needs to make a better job of making sure we explore the other side the spectrum. If you have a very macho guy, maybe have more of the opposite who aren't like that, who can still get the girl.

I try to have a balance of things you like and things you don't like about a character. But once you start that, all these scripts are like, "You play the douchebag friend of Ashton Kutcher." It's all these characters that are overconfident or hyper-masculine.

I like my male characters as much my female characters, but I always seem to have less for them to say.

The thing about 'Next to Normal' is that it really is an ensemble piece for six actors. They are all asked to do very important things in the show, and I think all six are equal in terms of telling the story.