Harmony Korine Quotes

I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.

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.

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 think goodness is very powerful, but often evil is made more attractive in films. It's a challenge to make goodness appealing.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

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

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.

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

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

None of us are good or evil, and that frustrates us because we want to see others as wearing a white hat or black hat. My hat is grey.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"

We are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it. Hence the culture of cancellations, firings, public humiliations and increasingly unforgiving judgments. The role of good journalism should be to lead us out of this dark defile.

I think a villain who starts his morning looking in the mirror, wringing his hands, and going, 'How can I be evil today?' is not an interesting villain. An interesting villain is a person who you understand on some level, I think.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

I was lucky enough to be raised by a man of great integrity and rectitude. That said, he was also human and had his secret sins, as we all do.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

I like playing complex, interesting characters. Sometimes I don't think there's much of a strong line between right and wrong for a character. Every character is somewhere on a moral spectrum.

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

I wanted to write a book about people who have the best intentions and think - really, truly think - that they're doing the right thing. And then they realize that when those ideals come knocking at their windowsill, a lot of times they will suddenly disavow those ideals.

There's this artistic drive or something in me that impels me to sympathize with villains, but it's maybe not a great impulse as someone who wants to do activism as well.