Hector Tobar Quotes

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

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.

I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

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

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

My basic philosophy is that no human being is a saint.

I always felt that heroes were essentially dull. Villains were more exotic and could do more interesting things.

I like my heroes to be imperfect; I like them to be striving. I identify with that kind of aspiration to do better.

A lot of people want to see this idealized version of heroism, all pretty and perfect, and I'm not interested in playing the goody-goody hero at all.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.

Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

Somehow super power and hero are so synonymous that they get combined into one word, 'superhero,' whereas I'm kind of more interested in separating those two ideas out. You have characters with super powers who may or may not be heroic, because human beings aren't all heroic. I tend to be drawn to antiheros.

Everybody is probably guilty of something. I'm sure that if anyone looked into my heart long enough, they could say, you know, 'Bill had some unkind thoughts back in second grade.'

I feel like, sometimes, characters that are just good and nice can seem boring or uninteresting.

Rosa Parks inspired many. She will not be forgotten.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling, he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for the nation.

I wanted to do something heroic if I was going to be on TV. And the first thing that appeals to me once I have decided I don't want to be the bad guy is to find things that are not black and white.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.