George R. R. Martin Quotes

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

We don't live in a world that's black and white.

I get the feeling that audiences have become mature and they understand that not every character is in black or white. There can be grey shades to it.

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

I like to show the grey area in all my characters.

The thing that I love about 'Scandal' is every character, it's not clear if they're good or bad. Everyone is both good and bad.

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.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

Because, also the world of showbiz is not just black and white, good and bad.

It's much less interesting as an actor playing someone who's purely good or purely evil.

The characters that have greys are the more interesting characters. The hero who sometimes crosses the line and the villain who sometimes doesn't are just much more interesting.

No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.

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.

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

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

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.

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.

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

There are many movies which come with an attitude of black and white. I am good and you are bad. And there are many movies that are also trying to see the reality as it is or to discover what really is behind the character or events.

It's good to play something that's black and white, and a guy that sees right and wrong. I've never played a character like that.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

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.

I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.