Ian Rankin Quotes

In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Jekyll & Hyde,' the hero decides on the terms of his transformation in a process that's explained not through the supernatural but the natural or, at least, through biochemistry.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

Characters who have some kind of free rein on their darker selves are always fun because they've taken the license off. You just get to fill out all the colors.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

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

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.

I've never seen any character I've ever played as a bad guy or a good guy.

I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun.

The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.

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

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.

It's much less interesting as an actor playing someone who's purely good or purely evil.

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!

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

In 'The X-Men' world, one can be a hero one day and a villain the next, which means there's a constant battle for a character's soul that's dynamic. I find that really fascinating.

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.

Even the toughest people have a backstory, and villains don't feel like they're the bad guys.

I definitely have a preference for writing anti-heroes and bad guys, especially when they have motivations that the average 'good' person can understand and get behind.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

No one is entirely good or evil; that is what the Warrior thinks when he has a new opponent.

If you're very clearly good or you're very clearly bad, then there isn't that much internal dilemma going on, and that's not necessarily as interesting to play.