Jacques Barzun Quotes

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.

I always try to find something I like about the bad guys and then try to find the mistakes and the flaws in the good guys.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

If we look too closely at many historical figures, we won't like what we see.

'The Truth' is not meant to preach or point any fingers. It's meant to show that perhaps we should all avoid taking the moral high ground unless we have thought about things a bit more.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.

When it's a moral grey zone, the audience has to think about what they feel and what they think is right or wrong. You want to affect your audience and make them think.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.

In a gray area, you don't have to provide an answer. And I don't want to. I don't want to make a comedy that's like, well, here's the answer. I don't want to make a comedy that's like, this is how to be a Muslim.

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together

It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things.

Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves. This is not the case here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right.

We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

Humanitarianism is rude.

I try and take everyone's ideals, common morals, flip them around, make people look at them differently, question them, so that you're not always taking things for granted.

I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.