Chris Morris Quotes

I can play really terrible human beings, and I seem to have a quality that people can, if not necessarily forgive me those sins, at least cut me some slack.

I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.

You hope that when you're playing someone possibly unsympathetic that you can bring them something redeeming, something people can hang onto.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I don't think it's an incredibly radical premise to try and have sympathy for someone who has made a mistake.

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

It is a very delicate job to forgive a man, without lowering him in his own estimation, and yours too.

We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

I think there is something in my books that says these are people doing their best under difficult circumstances - sometimes they do wrong things and make mistakes, but who doesn't? And who wants to read about somebody who never does?

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution.

I don't want to tell your story because you're a insensitive, self-centered moron. I've told a lot of stories about young people, and I always feel there's hope.

Portraying as human the people you hear about on the news doing bad things is dangerous. But it's also necessary and important.

You can't tell stories and really walk in someone's shoes and not have a love for them, even if they're doing horrible things.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.

Maybe it's because I'm a little naive, but I do like to think that there aren't really very many truly bad people in the world. I think that everybody has their reasons for what they do, and if you really look through their eyes, you could probably understand them.

My heart gets very tender when it comes to playing someone who has wronged someone else. I almost feel like it's easier for me to play having been wronged than it is to actually feel like you had an active part in hurting someone.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

Sometimes someone that is the 'villain' in your life, when you look deeper and you think of what their issues are and why they behave like that and where they came from - they become less of a villain and more of someone that you can understand.

I don't judge my characters.

It's interesting sometimes when an audience can empathize with a villain.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.

There's gotta be a human being in everybody, regardless of what they do or what people think they did.