James Frain Quotes

[Toby Jones] is completely different. It's a completely different character. He's the darkest villain we've had. There was always something charming and engaging about Moriarty. There was something fascinating and actually amoral, rather than immoral, about Charles Augustus Magnussen. This guy is the purest evil. Sherlock [Holmes] is actually appalled by him.

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

Good men are bad men's instructors, And bad men are good men's materials.

Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

I enjoy playing evil, but not one-dimensional evil characters. I like the ebbs and cracks in the armor.

Comic book characters are characters who wear costumes. They're not necessarily different than other characters. The trend I think that you're seeing are comic book movies, at least the ones that Marvel makes, don't have comic book stories. They have dramatic human stories.

Speak not evil of the absent for it is unjust.

You know you are really famous the day you discover you have become a comic character!

He wasn't evil as much as magnificently innocent of any kind of morality.

Each one of us has both; good and evil virtues. Those who decide to focus on the good ones succeed in life.

What's important at this time is to re-clarify the difference between hero and villain.

The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.

Perhaps the image you have of the devil is a cartoon of a man in a red suit with horns a pointy tale and a pitch fork, Satan would love for you to think of him as a harmless cartoon character, but don't be fooled... Satan is anything but harmless.

For the man who makes everything that leads to happiness, or near to it, to depend upon himself, and not upon other men, on whose good or evil actions his own doings are compelled to hinge,--such a one, I say, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation; this is the man of manly character and of wisdom.

The man of noble mind seeks to achieve the good in others and not their evil. The little-minded man is the reverse of this.

It's a different thing with cable TV. You don't have to have your characters be lovely again by the end of the episode. And in this era of the male antiheroes on cable TV, you don't even need to make them likable; you just need to make them compelling. As opposed to film, where it's still those basic tropes of good versus evil. But for women, I don't think that has been widely seen yet.

The problem of good and evil is not the problem of good and evil, but only the problem of evil. In opposition to good there are evil characters, but there are no good characters in opposition to evil. Evil is arguable, but good is not. Therefore the Devil always wins the argument.

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.

I love when I get to play these characters that are bigger than life. There are roles in animation that I never get to do in real life - and it appeals to my ego as an actor to play the Queen of Everything. I admit it.

Homer Simpson has been more inspirational to me than probably any cartoon character. What he represents, I think, there's a part of that in everybody. There certainly is in me, and I love that.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

I just devoured all of his [Buster Keaton’s] films because his sense of comic timing was amazing. He’s the closest a human being has ever come to a cartoon character. And I was just amazed at his sense of character and timing, the humor. It's all just so…sophisticated, even when you watch it today.