Famous Quotes & Sayings

Michael Ondaatje

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

I think our guys kind of got where we played to keep from losing than playing to win. But it showed a lot of character to hang in there the way they did.

Chris Crutcher

I realized that I wanted to be a writer and I had characters and topics all around me to write about,

Harvey Keitel

I read Get Shorty and Be Cool. He's a wonderful writer. He has his ear and his pen on the pulse of these kinds of characters he's writing about.

Rick Carlisle

I'm pleased for our team. I thought we showed some real toughness and some real character. Our tough-mindedness has waned lately. That's something that if we're going to be a playoff team, it can't happen.

I'm proud of John coming out and playing. That showed a lot of character.

I'm proud of David. But not what's he's done in the pool, but the integrity and character and the man and the daddy he is, is what I'm the most proud of.

I'm particularly delighted by some of the character and quality of the people.

Joe Gibbs

I'm just happy for him that he is playing well, ... A lot of times up here you go through tough things. At any one time in the NFL, you're going to have a number of players on a team who are going through tough situations. A lot of times the way they handle it is a measure of someone's character. I think that was Mark's situation last year and Patrick's situation now. The way you go through the tough times leads you to improvement and great performance in the future. It's a test of character when you go through that.

John Harbaugh

I?m just proud of the character of these guys. We have a long way to go and there are a lot of things we need to get better at. But everybody played disciplined and had good self-control. We played well.

Tony Shalhoub

I have never seen a role like this of an Arab-American that's seen in such a positive light -- a really well-rounded character with a sense of humor, a professional life, a family life. Not a goodie-goodie -- a person who has his flaws and his shortcomings -- but a real character, not a stereotype.

James Spader

I had an idea of what David Kelley wanted the character to do, ... He really wanted this very sort of volatile force at this well-established firm on 'The Practice' ... to stir things up.

Mavis Gallant

The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame showing characters in a simple situation....

Lily Tomlin

The film is very 'Nashville'-like in the sense that there are all of these characters who intermingle because we're on the same radio show,

Jill McCorkle

The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.

Neal Pollack

Television characters live inside our minds as though they're actual people. In fact, we know more about them than we do about most people in our physical lives.

Neal Stephenson

Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.

Natasha Richardson

Im not the kind of actress that goes home with the character. I mean, youre thinking about the work or the next days scenes, but not staying in character. But as a film goes on, you become more and more fragile, emotionally. And physically too, actually.

Nate Berkus

About 80 percent of the stuff I live with is old. I like letting things take on the character they’re meant to have by really being used. … when you own things that have the imperfections they deserve, that they’ve earned from a well-lived life, it frees you from feeling as though they’re untouchable.

Morgan Saylor

I really do like working very closely with a director and developing characters.

Morgan Freeman

Costume is always an asset. Normal costume you have a lot to say about - if you're wearing suits or ties, and what color you want, and how it's going to be cut, and stuff like that, and whether or not you're going to wear a hat, and blah, blah, blah. But, when you're wearing a special costume, and of course, costume is probably the second ingredient in character, script being first, I always find that the costume does a lot to cement your character, to put it firmly in mind.

Morgan Freeman

I've just never been the kind of actor that things have stayed with. I've never needed to carry a character off stage.

Morgan Freeman

I don't have to do anything. The character is shaped on the page.

Morgan Freeman

Part of acting is having the security to turn yourself loose and let yourself go in order to reach whatever depths a character has. If your guts aren't hanging out there, you don't offer anything.

Morgan Freeman

I always wanted to be a fireman, a cop, an Indian chief, a doctor, a lawyer. I always wanted to be all these things, so I am drawn to these kinds of characters.

Morgan Freeman

Still, it can be more effective to accomplish what you need to accomplish with the minimum effort. Watch Anthony Hopkins. He doesn't appear to be doing anything. He is so still that you can't see him working, but you are drawn into his character through his very stillness.

Morarji Desai

Society at present suffers far more from waste of money than from want of it. There is dignity in every attempt to economise. It indicates self-denial and imparts strength of character. It produces a well-regulated mind.

Milan Kundera

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

Milan Kundera

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Milan Kundera

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

Milan Kundera

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

Milan Kundera

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

Milan Kundera

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.