Barry Eisler Quotes

Good guy' or 'bad guy', hero or anti hero; doesn't matter to me, what role I play, only the character have something magical.

The nice thing about 'Farscape' is that you got to be the good guy and still do the bad guy things.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

I played characters with villainous aspect. But out-and-out villain? No.

Look, we're in the time of the anti-hero.

I look for characters that are extremely flawed and the anti-hero.

I don't think there are any negative roles anymore. I think we can aptly put such characters under 'anti-hero' tag.

In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments.

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

I don't know why I always get to play these guys who have few redeeming features. But don't knock it. Villains are much more fun.

I want to look at this character from all points of view. I know I don't want to make them all good or all bad or all anything... the story itself often helps create the character.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

There's a darkness to Riddick that I think allows people to want him to do bad things because you know Riddick is going to do bad things: that's just the way it is. But I think that at his core, who he is and what he's fighting for is something that everybody can identify with.

In general, I am more interested in the darker characters when I watch or read stories.

When it comes to your hero, what the readers really fall in love with are his flaws. No one ever falls in love with a perfect hero.

A lot of my characters are anti-heroes that became heroes.

Namor has shades of grey but always ends up doing the right thing. I've played characters with an edge - played villains if not super villains - and he's an anti-hero.

The script of 'Shaapit' was such that the leading man couldn't be shown indulging into anything heroic.

I am generally wary of the demand for 'likeability' in fiction, which I think is a bastardisation of the demand of identification - itself something of a suspect notion.

One of things that drives me nuts is you rarely get bad guys who are written very well.

I love the character of Jaime Lannister. He's just so complex - a character that we love to hate - but it's a lot more complex than hatred. It starts off, and he seems so arrogant and so smug.