I like strong women. I think a lot of women relate to strong characters, and a cop is still a strong character.
I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.
Through language, we can tell the truth and hear the truth spoken, just as we can be deceived. Sometimes it's a painful realization: we can be lied to. As I write, I think of myself as putting my eye under oath, so that what I write is the truth about my characters.
I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.
I'm not a big believer in the idea of genre - I'm a fan of any writer who can pull me into compelling characters and stories - but I can't imagine I'll start writing domestic dramas any time soon.
I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.
Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.
To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.
I think every time there's a show like 'Modern Family' or 'Will & Grace' that portray gay and lesbian characters and is successful, it just further opens the door.
From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into the fabric of India's education, and my father understood that in a culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare's characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way.
To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like 'Once Upon a Time' enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren't in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.
I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters.
More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it's always funnier.
Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.
Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.
Tennessee Williams was so adept at portraying characters who are both fallible and vulnerable. Women were a huge influence in his life, his mother and sister in particular.
I think that the worst thing as an actor is to fall into a monotony with characters.
I'm an actor. I have to play weird characters, quirky characters, strange characters, sometimes characters I don't understand.
If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.
I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
I think, with certain characters, you have to listen. Sometimes, listening can be funnier: the thing you don't say is the one-liner. That's the ying to the yang.
Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length. I've put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences. Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters. Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind - above all the subconscious mind.
It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.
That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.
The bottom line is we go to theatre to vicariously spend time with really intense characters.
Here's the thing that people don't understand: I don't really care. I've never been a careerist. It's not a strategy. I react to certain characters and story lines and specific mode of filmmaking.
I am a method actor, but I'm also a film actor as well as a method actor. Characters that don't have humility, whether they are heroes or villains, are hard to relate to. All characters in every aspect of what we do should have humility. If they don't, then they're a cartoon character.
The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.
What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters.
As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters.
'The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears' is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are.
In the film industry, you are fictitious, just like the characters you play. It has a lot do with a perception about you, and not necessarily you. You are successful because people like that image of you on screen.
I want to continually play characters that speak to me, but also are different than what I've just done.
Most of the characters I write with don't think an awful lot about their faith. They're not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.
Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.
