empathy with characters Quotes

I always have strong feelings when I'm writing a book. Sometimes when I'm writing a book, I even cry when I'm writing. Once I read a quotation that I thought was very true for me, which is: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

I look back at my career when I was younger and can connect what I was going through at the time with the characters I was playing. I see the similarities in them reflecting on my life.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

Usually, when you're in a movie, you're disconnected from it. You're never going to feel what you felt when you made it.

It is only the untalented director who imagines him or herself in every part, wants his or her own thoughts and emotions portrayed; it is only the untalented who make their own limitations those of the actors as well.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

In acting, you're only responsible for your part. When you're directing, the load is on your shoulders, so you have to feel a strong connection to the material. It's a higher bar to get over.

As an actor, I've learned to become a detective. You have to figure out who that person is. If the character is a thief, you have to figure out what makes them a thief. Whatever the prevailing idiosyncrasy is, I have to find it in the script.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

For some reason, my main movie, Lady Sings the Blues, to me really isn't me. I really can let go of Diana Ross when I see the movie. I'm really objective when I'm watching it. I liked that movie so much. That movie was like magic so that when I'm looking at it I'm really not seeing myself, I'm seeing the actress. I'm seeing another person, not the me of me.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.

If the audience gets everything, if they see the photography and notice that it is good, then the story goes out the window, but if you become involved with the lives of the actors and forget that you are seeing mechanical devices on a huge screen - forget the make-believe - this is the job of the director to involve the audience with the actors.

Part of the beauty of a long-format story is that the characters become as much yours as they are mine, and you dream of them in a different way than I do.