Michael Scott Quotes

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I like characters who are contradictory.

All of these mechanisms we have for celebrating are so double-edged. So much sorrow comes out of joy.

Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there's a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what's wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they're inseparable.

The body is our enemy, and yet is our friend.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.

I am a person whose father had no religion but who went to the nuns for a couple of years. And I think I'm the same: On one hand, I pray; on the other hand, I don't believe. I am constantly between the two.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

When that man wants something, he'll stop at nothing to get it. And I also believed in the good of him.

Power is paradoxical.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

I would say that I have a love-hate relationship with almost everything in my life, including stand-up.

When I'm doing a drama, I wish I was doing something funny. When I'm doing something funny, I wish I was doing something more serious. I think it's just human nature.

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.