George Saunders Quotes

Well, you need the villain. If you don't have a villain, the good guy can stay home.

It is much more fun to write about villains then heroes. The villains are the ones that think out the scheme, and the heroes just kind of come along for the ride.

All stories boil down to good vs. evil, and that's what the archetypal American Western was.

Nobody wants to play the antihero.

There's gotta be a villain; there's gotta be a good guy.

I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.

The bad guys are the best parts.

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.

Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.

'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.

For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role.

We love a tale of heroes and villains and conflicts requiring a neat resolution.

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.

Without the villain, the hero sits at home on his couch.

I look for characters that are extremely flawed and the anti-hero.

Usually, you just have a hero and a villain - in any movie, not just a superhero movie.

In every story I've written with Batman, there's an element of justice - you never want to have the story end on a defeatist or a cynical note.

For me, a story always goes out of a mistake. Somebody makes a mistake, and that becomes the story. Probably that explains why my series are kind of dark: because there's a problem to begin with.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

For me, all drama is based on conflict.

In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest.

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