Character Quotes

My central strength as an actor is the fact that I'm 6 foot 3. A certain power emanates from my size, juxtaposed with the fact that I try to find an element of sensitivity in every character I play. People enjoy seeing that because it goes against what we're led to expect as far as the way men are supposed to be - macho and all that.

~ Jimmy Smits

It's very easy to approach a character like that - a so-called strong woman who overcomes the odds - and give a one-note performance, playing that strength alone. Strength is only one thing a person has.

~ Mary Steenburgen

There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.

~ Sean Penn

The Hulk was a unique character because of his strength and power. He doesn't have a costume like Spiderman or like Superman - The Hulk is more visual. His passion and his strength, that is what separates him from anything else.

~ Lou Ferrigno

At some point, I fell in love. Shortly thereafter, I got my heart broken. Sniff, sniff. And I realized at a young age - no matter what any adult literary critic would have us believe about female strength and autonomy - there is no test to strength of character like love.

~ Lauren Kate

I started 'SNL,' and I became the one who did impressions. I did that, but then I wanted to get an original character on, and that took a long time to get one on that stuck. And then I got Vinny Vedecci on - 'Oh great' - and then it took a couple more seasons to get Greg the Alien on. You have to have some patience.

~ Bill Hader

To anybody who says to me, 'I'm in character,' I say, 'You should be in an asylum.' If you don't know that you're pretending, then you should really seek medical help. I don't have patience for that stuff.

~ D. B. Sweeney

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.

~ Steven Stucky

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

~ P. J. O'rourke

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

~ Luigi Pirandello

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

~ Michel Houellebecq

My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied.

~ Horatio Nelson

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

~ Martin Luther King

The endless teen franchises that come out of Hollywood... more often than not, the central character doesn't have any discernible character traits. They're just the young, good-looking guy who goes on this journey. They're always played by fantastic young actors, but ultimately, they're not very interesting characters.

~ Taron Egerton

Costumes say a lot about a character. When it came to 'Palo Alto,' it was important for me that the kids didn't look perfect. In most teen movies today, all of the clothes are expensive. I remember wearing a lot of dirty vintage clothes.

~ Gia Coppola

I found my niche as a character actor, and I've never felt like a movie star or teen idol and never wanted to.

~ Vincent D'onofrio

This is actually something no one knows, but my mom was really the one who created the entire style for 'Teen Witch.' I'm dead serious. She was super involved, and is super creative, so I wore a lot of my actual clothes in the movie. Truly, Louise was my mom's vision. She really created an iconic character.

~ Robyn Lively

I'm not a fan of anybody music who I feel like a sucka. I don't listen to you. They play you in the club, you can have the #1 jam, but if I know your character, how can I listen to your music?

~ Gucci Mane

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

~ Franz Liszt

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

~ Peter Shaffer

Children who reach the age of eighteen with their entire skills set composed on Nintendo and eating Doritos have been neglected. Their parents neglected to give them the character traits necessary to live successfully.

~ Dave Ramsey

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Everyone is the sum total of past experiences. A character doesn't just spring to life at age thirty.

~ Kelley Armstrong

I read all the time that people think I'm arrogant. They say I am cocky, a bad character. I had that from a young age. But when they meet me, they say, 'That image doesn't fit you.'

~ Zlatan Ibrahimovic

At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.

~ Nicolas Cage

You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.

~ Norman Douglas

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

~ Quentin Crisp

It is an amazing feature in the French character that they will let themselves be led away so easily by bad counsels and yet return again so quickly. It is certain that as these people have, out of their misery, treated us so well, we are the more bound to work for their happiness.

~ Marie Antoinette

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Character is power; it makes friends, draws patronage and support and opens the way to wealth, honor and happiness.

~ John Howe

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

~ Olivia Wilde

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

~ Christopher Nolan

You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again.

~ Julianne Moore

I do believe at the end of the night when you're with your family, the character gets hung up on the door like a coat, and is there to be taken on the next morning.

~ Liam Neeson

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

~ Victoria Abril

I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence - you know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop - the idea that we're going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

~ Angela Duckworth

While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States - that is, prosperity.

~ Herbert Hoover

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

~ Quentin Crisp