Jimmi Simpson Quotes

I am constantly interested in people who society calls 'bad' because I don't like to just buy into something that everybody's going to say. I want to investigate that for myself. With a character, you get to fully investigate that emotionally and understand the parts of them that are in pain and scared and are good. That's human.

She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.

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. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

My characters make incomprehensible decisions until you stand in their shoes. Then it makes more sense. Life is very rarely black and white, and most people are trying to do their best. I try not to judge.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

I never see my bad guys as simply bad. They want pretty much the same thing that you and I want: they want to be happy.

I embrace everything about Ally... I don't particularly see her as a whiner. One week she's tough, the next she's really weak. I love that. She's human.

I think, to me, I was always taught you never approach any character as a villain. Every human being on earth really believes that they're doing the best thing. We all have our rationalizations.

The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

Characters, like people, don't need to be right - only understood and, perhaps, accepted. We are all grey, lighter and darker, depending on our state of security.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

There's really no "bad" people; there's just humans who are doing the best they can to figure life out. It's hard! We can all relate to that.

Being hurt inevitably breeds feelings of hatred towards your attacker. But when we hurt others, we have to deal with their hatred for us, and our own feelings of guilt. But knowing what it feels like to be hurt is exactly why we try to be kind to others. That's what makes us human.

This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.

I wanted to tell you everything. And that hurt because some things were too scary. Some things even I didn’t understand. How could I tell someone—someone I was really talking to for the first time—everything I was thinking? I couldn’t. It was too soon.

Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses... Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people.

People are hurting. People are suffering. But you can not get everywhere.