James McAvoy Quotes

Alas,we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.

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.

Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent.

It's very strange that you condemn me as a terrorist at the same time as you call on me to help you combat terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. It doesn't make sense!

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

I'm just an innocent guy with a dirty mouth, I guess.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

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.

I wish you well and I hope it will be a huge hit, because that would be very good for me. And if, God forbid, it's a terrible flop, well that would be very good for me.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

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

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 always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

We do things for good reasons that are bad.

Hollywood is a place of great irony at all times.

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.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

We've had crooks from the beginning of time... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

I don't believe that if you do good, good things will happen. Everything is completely accidental and random. Sometimes bad things happen to very good people and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But at least if you try to do good things, then you're spending your time doing something worthwhile.

In America, we like everyone to know about the good work we're doing anonymously.