Character Realism Quotes

To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

Meryl Streep doesn't care how she looks. She just surrenders to the truth of the character. Not everybody has the ability to do that. They look good and they can pretend to be that person, it's not the same as being that person. And there are not many actors who will surrender to that.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

The best characters are always wretchedly flawed

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I thought Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest writers, because I felt I knew Sherlock Holmes. He existed to me. When I went to England the first thing I did was go to Baker Street to look for his house. I think you've got to try to make all of your characters as empathetic and realistic as possible.

Beware 'good' main characters who have a limited repertory of culturally acceptable feelings, while your evil bastards have a full range of vivid, passionate feelings.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

Every character, if fleshed out properly, is being taken seriously.

As an actor, it's my job to prepare myself for a role. If the character is realistic, one can't go wrong.

You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

I love those preliminary conversations about who a character is. You try on wigs, shoes and clothes. It's preferable when it's not about looking pretty. It can get a little dull to just be cute. We talk about things like, maybe my character can't afford these Christian Louboutins.

Some people say, 'Well you're a man; how do you write about women or girls when you don't know about them?' Well, I've got my imagination, and I can write about women. Yes, I'll never be pregnant and give birth to children, but I can imagine a bit of what it's like. When you create characters, it's just about making them really real to people.

There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?

Once I've properly finished a book, my ideal state of being would be to never think about it again. But with 'Capital,' I felt I'd spent so much time with the characters that they were very, very real, and I definitely had a sense of loss about leaving them behind in a way I've not quite had before.

To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

I knew what kind of genre 'Casa de mi Padre' was going for. But my character, specifically, I think is very real.