Marti Noxon 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.

I don't play bad guys. I think that's why I keep getting cast as bad guys: because I don't want to play bad guys. I want to play human beings that struggle with life.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

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.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

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.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.

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.

As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

I'm not interested in a character's goodness. I'm interested in what makes them human.

The beauty of Sudhir's protagonists is that they are not shown as black and white. There are various layers to the characters.

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.

'Star Wars' is very black and white, and honestly, I like it that way. But fantastical settings like that work best when the characters within them feel real. Real people have conflicts and make mistakes and get it wrong sometimes.

Broadchurch' was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.

I don't like villains who are just villains. People who are just there to be bad - ugh - so annoying.

If you break things down to goodies and baddies, the baddies are always a bit more alluring in fiction, and that's true from a narrative point of view. But I wanted to write a novel about real life, and real life is a bit more nuanced than that.

I think if you read the story as bad guy turns good guy, then clearly it is a cliché. But my experience, when I spent three years working with young people in the townships on issues principally around HIV/AIDS, is that people are usually neither entirely good or bad. They are usually variations of both. Just because someone is a carjacker doesn't mean they are a ruthless cold-blooded murderer.

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

I loved 'Homeland' - it's such an intriguing, intelligent piece of television, and I am fascinated by them making a hero and heroine that are so odd, so flawed and so complicated. It is a programme that really draws you in.

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.

For any character, male or female, I think it's important to have... it's cliche to say a flawed character, but to really think about the good and the bad and make sure that both are present, and it doesn't just become a glossed over icon of perfection.

I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.