Ian McDiarmid Quotes

There are good characters and bad characters.

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

I wish people wouldn't think of me as a saint - unless they agree with the definition of a saint that a saint's a sinner who goes on trying.

What are movies for if not to have the good guys triumph over the bad ones?

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.

'3:10 to Yuma' was one that I just kept on talking and thinking about after reading it. And I think the reason is because, like in most Westerns, you have the very clear-cut bad-guy/good-guy, however, as the movie progresses, you kind of see that it's a very fine line that divides these two.

To me, Darth Vader is the epitome of evil.

I didn't realize House would be the central character, more the bitter comic relief appearing occasionally. I relish his wounded nature - the lameness, the scarred Byronic hero.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

I don't believe in anti-heroes. Duke Wayne played a mean guy but never an anti-hero.

I was really good at being a bad guy.

Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

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.

The most unrealistic thing I've ever read in comics is when some group of characters calls themselves the Brotherhood of Evil or the Masters of Evil. I don't believe any character believes their goals to be truly evil.

A lot of times evil - or, in the case of comedy, stupid - is more interesting than the hero.

A lot of people might gawk at it, but I really love 'Revenge of the Sith' because of what happens to Anakin.

' Daisies' is about a guy touching dead people and bringing them back to life. It's kind of morbid, you know. But there's a love to it. There's a kind-heartedness to it that I think makes it - I don't know; it's a good thing to put out there in the world, so I'm glad people responded.

Nobody wants to play the antihero.

You should always take what I say about religion with a grain of salt, because the 7 deadly sins are more like my seven daily activities. I try to check them all off at least once a day. All of them except gluttony; my trainer keeps that under control.

I always felt like Azula and Long Feng were much more interesting villains and three-dimensional characters than Ozai, who was just sort of a big jerk. Like a really big jerk, but not very complex or human.

When you're talking about villainy, then you're automatically circling around to talk about justice.

If you can't play the good guy, sometimes you've got to play the villain.

I'm a New Yorker. I'm liberal and open-minded. Things don't really shock me. But I was reading the second-act today and thinking that if you're religious, you could be. But you shouldn't be! You can be extremely religious and have your faith and still be open-minded to art. Because this is art. That's part of the excitement. It literally is "The Jerry Springer Show" on-stage set to beautiful operatic music. That's what's so incredible about it!

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.