Jessica Hagedorn Quotes

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

The side of fairytales I don't like is that they always have happy endings, that there's just good and evil, and things are perfect. But life is a little more complicated, and that's what I try to teach my kids.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

We are all somewhere or the other a little grey, not black and white. We have our imperfections.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

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

If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I'll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don't believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.

I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

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.

I'm always interested in what we're not being shown. So if you're playing ostensibly a quote-unquote 'baddie,' what are their good sides, and vice versa.

The truth is complicated, and few people are actually monsters.

If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren't bad people. They all have their justifications.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.

I don't believe in bad and good, I believe we are all a mix of both.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.

You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

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.

We try to do that for stories - we try to say, 'OK, here's the message, here's the theme, here's the good people and the bad.' Life is not nearly like that.