Joshua Cohen Quotes

Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.

I won't say there's a good Richard and a bad Richard, but I've got a switch, and when it clicks on, I'm somebody else.

'Jekyll and Hyde' I read in high school. I was expecting a Hollywood-type horror story and couldn't believe it when I got this very complex narrative from all these different points of view.

Obviously I have more in common with Jekyll, but there's something about Hyde.

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

Seeing my malevolent face in the mirror, my benevolent soul shrinks back.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

I like playing people with a dark side.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

We like Batman - we understand him, we suffer with him. On the other hand, we want to be Superman. But they're conflicting philosophies. Let's bring them together in one movie and see how we, as an audience, wrestle with our inner demons.

I have never played a role in which someone's dark side shouldn't be explored.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

My wife would say I'm more Hyde than Jekyll!

I've always been an angel. Sometimes I transform into a witch only because the filmmaking demands it.

In real life, I don't think anybody is all one shade. People who are perceived to be really good have bad thoughts and inclinations that they sometimes act on, I'm sure, and people have different sides to themselves.

Everyone likes to be the heel. Everyone wants to be the bad guy. I mean, I love being the bad guy, but the crowd doesn't want me to be a bad guy. In real life, I'm too much of a good guy to be a bad guy.

I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

I wanted to write a play about double nature ... one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.