Erich Fromm Quotes

His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he's very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

As human beings, we are all flawed. And just like there is a good side, there is also a bad side waiting to find its way out.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

Mike and I are always drawn to the idea that there is light and dark inside every being, rather than the old two-dimensional trope of good versus evil.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

You can't just blame things on evil. Everyone's a human, so when people say that somebody's behaving 'inhuman,' it's not. It's very human - it's just not a very nice side of it.

What I'm saying is people like Hoodwink are not kind of evil villains, they're part of humanity. We can choose to disassociate ourselves from them and we can choose to pretend they're not there, but they are. We're all together in this.

Stanley didn't shy away from true humanity or from the ugliness that all people are capable of.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

There's a little good and bad in everyone. Everybody I've ever loved is very complicated.

The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.