Monica Dolan Quotes

Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.

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

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

There is the moral spectrum in 'Fargo,' and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.

I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.

As the actor, you can't go in saying, 'I'm the bad guy.' You've got to think your reasons for doing what you're doing are good.

For myself, suffering doesnt make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it edifying?

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.

I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a writer.

It seems that the world considers whoever gets benefit is the virtuous one

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.

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

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

I don't want to sacrifice my life, as I feel that I'm still very selfish and still want to pursue my dreams.

When you play so many outcasts and derelicts, or even a murderer, you need to play someone healthy.

You want to go into scenes thinking not that you're the good guy or the bad guy, but that you've got a job to do. And I'm not talking about as an actor; I'm talking about as the character.

I can play a man who's despicable. But I'll still look inside him to find a point of connection. If I can find that kernel, audiences will relate to me.

When I look at a character, whether he's good or bad, one scene or 10 scenes, I just have to find my way in.

I stopped living according to my core values. I knew what I was doing was wrong but thought only about myself and thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren't competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We're all of these things. We're complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.

I love Cillian Murphy's character in 'Peaky Blinders' and Tom Hardy's in 'Taboo' - theses are characters that, as audience members, we follow along with and root for. But our own morality is tested throughout that journey, because these characters ride a thin line between morality and amorality.

No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.

I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.