Character Quirks Quotes

In the past, I was always drawn to really quirky, idiosyncratic characters.

What I love about 'The Office' is the fast pace and the zaniness of those characters.

To me, the more bizarre the character, the more I'm attracted to it.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

I'm a quirky dude, man.

I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.

The wonderful thing about Crystal in Mr. Sunshine is that she doesn't have any boundaries. She's not aware socially of what's correct and incorrect. Crystal's probably the craziest character I've ever had to do and the furthest I've gone, with the only exception being Away We Go - I was pretty big in that.

Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.

I do weird parts - there's always something wrong with my character, or they are in a really weird situation.

I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.

The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.

'Twin Peaks' has got interesting characters. They are all different from anything anyone has ever seen before. You've had bad people before. But everyone's got little quirks, and everyone's interesting.