Character Knowledge Quotes

You want to feel, 'I know that character.'

I'm not the kind of actor that would know what my character had for breakfast last Tuesday.

I know my 'Archie' history.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

I think the ultimate goal is that when we're off-stage, we know everything our character is thinking. Hopefully when we are on-stage, our thoughts are our character's thoughts because we really know that much about them.

I have such respect for guest actors. They don't know all the characters as deeply as the regulars, and the cast isn't your family, so you have more at stake.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

Confident people, who understand comedy, improvise so much better than people who are scared. You can't be scared to improvise. You have to know your character, and then you have to let go.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

I think nobody knows more about comic book characters than Seth Green. I thought I knew a lot, and he leaves me in the dust.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

For me, pressure is self-imposed, and it's good for me. The best actors are the most prepared because it's all imaginary and you have to know the character inside out.

Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.

Even if you know a character really well, there's no formula for what jokes will work and what won't.

And one of the things that's interesting about how they're doing the show is that the audience almost knows more than the characters do in some of these scenes, and the extent of that is unique. So it's grown into a different show in a way. It's sort of grown into a different experience watching it.

He'd never seen Seinfeld, so he didn't know who Puddy was or anything.

But when you get to know a character so well, you start to have insights that you can't show because you're confined to your script of your hit show.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

I have never written a novel that volleys back and forth between a couple of different first person perspectives. It's definitely a challenge because I had to think about who knows what, when do they know it, when are they sharing what they know or what they think they know, how the reader's perspective affects things. Telling the story in that way is challenging. It does require a lot of revision.

It's not really a preparation when you know the character that you're playing. It's not too difficult. It would be more difficult the first time, I guess.

If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind.

Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

As an actor I can sort of smell a duff note, that isn't full of that much conviction. My worst thing with directors is when I know more than them about the character.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.