Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

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

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

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

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.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

'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.

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

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

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.

One of my themes is that there is good and evil in everyone. I was not out to make these guys heroes. I really don't believe in heroes. The best of people have a dark side and it's a constant struggle for the better side to survive and to thrive.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

In all of us, there is a struggle between the good and the bad. It makes it more palpable and real to play such people as an actor.

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.