Edie Falco Quotes

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I'll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don't believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.

Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

We are all somewhere or the other a little grey, not black and white. We have our imperfections.

If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren't bad people. They all have their justifications.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

In the world we make good as evil and evil as good.

The more intelligent the storytelling becomes and the deeper the character development, people will realize in film and television, like they do in real life, that human beings possess both good and bad.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

There is no possible source of evil except good.

I always try to find something I like about the bad guys and then try to find the mistakes and the flaws in the good guys.

Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.

None of my on-screen roles have been outright negative. They have all been grey, and that is how it is in reality, too. None of us are nice and sweet 24/7.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.