Steven Knight Quotes

It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

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.

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

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.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

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

I've never seen any character I've ever played as a bad guy or a good guy.

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.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

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

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

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

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

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.

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.

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.

In the world we make good as evil and evil as good.

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.