Quotes & Sayings About Opposite Characters

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father. — Alexander Lowen

The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man's general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling. — Doug Stanhope

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I — Plato

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character ... tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game. — Northrop Frye

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know...
M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute "M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met — M.M. Bennetts

As writers, we must keep throwing problems at our characters. Conflict is the heart of good storytelling. Hiking in nature along a twisting trail can remind us what a good story feels like. It's the opposite of a treadmill - or an interstate highway. — Kate Klise

On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:
too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,
too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,
too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,
too many divorces to grant,
heirs to disinherit,
trysts to arrange,
letters to misdirect into evil hands,
innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,
women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,
men to drive to adultery and theft,
fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. — Michael Chabon

Most men like in women what is most opposite their own characters. — Henry Fielding

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind. — Nicole Krauss

Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters - as a good first reader ought - we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftmanship. Surprisingly, such dissection doesn't murder the experience. Just the opposite: Only then does a work of art fully live. — Michael Dirda

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite. — Eve Ensler

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer. — Adam Johnson

I always gravitate towards characters that are so opposite of me. — Aaron Paul

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics. — Zosia Mamet

Some actors can create characters and leave them at 'Cut!', but I work the opposite way and drag them out of me. For me, it's about fixing your fabric to fit the role. — Sam Worthington

In 'Mirror Mirror,' I played Prince Charming's side kick Renbock, who was pretty dandy, hapless and innocent. Other than that I've tended to play the complete opposite! I've played gritty, hard characters, generally tough people. — Robert Emms

Fowles has said that the nineteenth-century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I rather think that the opposite is the case
this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of characters
as well as providing a Greek chorus
than any first person mimicry. — A.S. Byatt

It is the modern nature of goodness to exert itself quietly, while a few characters of the opposite cast seem, by the rumor of their exploits, to fill the world; and by their noise to multiply their numbers. — Hannah More

It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking. — Christopher Lloyd

But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone's development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality. Had — Alain De Botton

I think I've been good at getting into lonely and troubled characters because, not to brag, but I'm the complete opposite in real life. — Kodi Smit-McPhee

For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite. — Robert McKee

People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it's a gay film ... I think that's really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be? — Todd Haynes

I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn't get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren't irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn't the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people. — Elif Batuman

Whereas Mirabelle is tall, thin and sad, Vesta is physically and emotionally her opposite. — Sara Sheridan

Affectation proceeds from one of these two causes,
vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues. — Henry Fielding

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog. — Max Barry

I love playing characters who are opposite of who I am. — Maiara Walsh

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time. — Patrick Rothfuss

Most of my characters are romantic rather than sexual. I think that's an essential difference in my pictures. I think they are more accurate in portraying young people as romantic - as wanting a relationship, an understanding with a member of the opposite sex more than just physical sex. — John Hughes