Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edward Albee

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.

Edward Albee

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

Edward Albee

I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there's work to be done - and discovery to be made.

Edward Albee

True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play.

Edward Albee

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

Edward Albee

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

Edward Albee

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

Edie Falco

One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

Eddie George

That mental grind is the same, and this show has to be approached with the same mentality. Rest is paramount. Taking care of my voice and making sure I have the right foods in my body is paramount. Making sure I'm doing my technique work and staying in the script is all substantial. Continually pushing myself to find different nuances in the character on a nightly basis. This is definitely boot camp for me all over again, and Broadway in general is a boot camp for all actors.

Eckhart Tolle

The characters get challenged. Through getting challenged, the character arrives at insights or discovers potentials that he or she didn't know they had.

Eckhart Tolle

As the character changes in the movie, it rubs off on the viewer, so the viewer also goes through that change.

Rene Auberjonois

The mask of the character was already written into the show, but I actually lobbied for a denser and more complete mask than they initially considered.

Lucinda Williams

The man I lived with is a Christian, so I would talk to him about it. What would this person do in the Bible? What's the story around this person? Generally, when people talk about characters in the Bible, there's one thing they're known for, like Job.

Jason Alexander

The mandate of our show is to find what makes us laugh. We had tough shoes to fill for this role, and finding someone to fit the character of Jeffrey was a challenge, if not a miracle. But when miracles happen, you don't question them.

Janina Gavankar

I want to continue to play characters that are not like me at all, and transform.

Holland Taylor

I've had some marvelous parts, but I'm also asked to play characters who are kind of superficial people.

Jonathan Mayhew

They are more properly ‘The Messengers of Satan to buffet us.’ No rulers are properly God’s ministers, but such as are ‘just, ruling in the fear of God.’ When once magistrates act contrary to their office, and the end of their institution when they rob and ruin the public, instead of being guardians of its peace … they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen.

Jonathan Keltz

As an actor, you get to sort of bounce back and forth in terms of the age range you play and the life experience that your characters have.

Jonathan Maberry

I’m not sure I could trust a man who would bypass an Oreo in favor of vanilla wafers. It’s a fundamental character flaw, possibly a sign of true evil.

Jonathan Lethem

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

Jonathan Lethem

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

Jonathan Lethem

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

Jonathan Jackson

Often times, if a character is pretty straightforward, he or she is not as interesting to portray.

Jonathan Groff

I sort of have the belief that you work being your character out while you're working on it, or that's been my experience so far. I throw myself into it 100% and try to live in that world, and then when it's over, just sort of be able to leave it behind.

Jonathan Banks

I do like when you find a true personal relationship with any of the characters, you like to make that honest connection. And every once in a while, there's that glimmer where you got that line in where something happens, where you get to really talk.

Jonathan Alter

Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.

Jonas Salk

If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.

Jon Voight

Obama is a very good actor. He knows how to play it. And he is very adept at creating this ''Obama'' - this character who is there whenever the world needs something.

Jonah Hill

The hardest thing for me to do, and the best thing I've done and learned as an actor is to sacrifice being funny in certain circumstances in order to do something that makes sense for the story or the character, or emotionally.

Jonah Hill

The comedy really comes from how badly you want these characters to succeed and with a comedy that's often hard.

Jonah Hill

I realized I never played a character that was skilled at anything, or skilled at anything that I couldn't become skilled at.