A Quote by John Logan

Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me.

John Logan

Quote Topics

Anguish Appeal Characters Comedian Dark Either Me Pain People People Say Say Theater Understand Vexing

Quote Author

John Logan
American - Producer

The tragedian will always be a limited tragedian if he has not learned how to laugh. The comedian who cannot weep will never touch the highest levels of mirth.

Ellen Terry

One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian.

Martha Graham

I don't have any special approach for playing dark characters. That's because I never looked at them as dark characters per se. For me, they were real people.

Tabu

I'm an actor. I have to play weird characters, quirky characters, strange characters, sometimes characters I don't understand.

Keke Palmer

My experience is at The Groundlings Theater, where we created different characters and did sketch comedy. And sometimes the characters were outrageous, but they always came from a real place. So even working there, we had to create characters from the people that we knew.

Cheryl Hines

I think the idea, first and foremost, is to understand that people may label these characters as villains, but at the end of the day I have to fall in love with the characters that I play. For me, they have to be real characters with real objectives, and driving forces. So they're all different.

Edi Gathegi

I understand pain very well, so I look for that in a role. If the characters are well-written, don't tell nobody, but I'll do the damn thing for free. I'm serious. It's the writing. I love beautifully flawed characters.

Michael K. Williams

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired.

Hal Crowther

I'm mostly interested in characters and how they manifest themselves in their relationships. I'm delighted that people relate to the characters in 'Bojack,' and hopefully they will too to the characters in 'Undone.' If they understand themselves or feel seen in a new way, I think that's a wonderful thing.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg

I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.

Will Cuppy

People say that to me and I think what unites all my characters is that they are hurt; it's most accurate to say I play characters that are hurt but are responding to their environment.

Ashley Judd

On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.

Alan Alda

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.

Jerome Stern

I think, the first time I played Iago at the Public Theater, I realized I had a - much to my chagrin - I realized I had an instinct for these conflicted characters, for these torn characters, for these characters who could be described as evil. I wouldn't describe them that way.