Spike Lee Quotes

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

I love to feature children and young adults as real people - flawed, naive, virtuous, venal - but real. I think it adds nuance and depth to the stories that wouldn't exist without them.

I like telling stories of imperfect people because most people are imperfect.

I'm very drawn to characters who are very flawed. I'm less interested in characters who are just good or bad, because to me then they're not real people.

I don't know anyone who's 100 percent pure - nor do I have any interest in portraying anyone like that.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

I don't like to play characters that are too perfect.

A perfect hero is about as boring as a perfect marriage.

Perfect heroes are cool, but no one can really empathize or identify with them.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

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

When I'm creating characters, I just want to create characters that I can relate to, and be as honest about them as people as I can be. That's what I want to see when I go to the movies.

I think people who have faults are a lot more interesting than people who are perfect.

The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.

My goal as an actor was just to be somebody very human. I'm not really interested in playing a character who is particularly cool and everything he does looks great and turns out great.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.