Daniel Handler Quotes

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

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

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

Nobody is all good or all bad.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

Nobody's perfect, and everybody plays the heel and the baby face at times in real life.

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

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

I'll tell you, there's no goodies and baddies in the world, there's just people with intentions that sometimes clash.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

All human beings are commingled out of 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.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.