Viggo Mortensen Quotes

I admit that I ain't no angel, I admit that I ain't no saint - I'm selfish and I'm cruel and I'm blind. If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. When they leave they're so hard to find.

I think we all have a kind of dark side, and that's what keeps life - and characters - interesting. That's one of the things that I'm drawn to write about again and again, the secrets we keep and how they shape us.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

If we are completely honest with ourselves, everyone has a dark side to their personalities.

I think that there's a hidden darkness in all of us!

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.

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

Like the character I played in 'Jekyll', we all have different masks we put on for different occasions. As much as we all want to lead decent lives, we're also attracted by the idea that something dark may lurk within us.

If you look at my body of work, there's always a dark side to my characters. They've always got a skeleton in the closet; they've always got a subtext.

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.

I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right - we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That's attractive to me.

I think we all have the capacity of evil in us.

I think all of us have a hero and a villain in us.

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.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

I think that there's a little bit of bad in all of us.

Some of the greatest stuff that I watch, that I'm drawn to, is deeply flawed human beings, because they're representing a part of us that might not be all of us but the part we're most afraid to look at, and so we get to vicariously experience it through this character.

Everybody has a dark side. It's just we are very in touch with it.

We see the worst versions of ourselves - things we did or could have done - in the characters who inspire us.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

We all have dark shadows in our self that come out every now and then.