Gena Showalter Quotes

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

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.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

people do terrible things, sometimes, for the best reasons.

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 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.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

Well, you know, in any novel you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against, and villains - I find the most interesting villains those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. Either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

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'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.

Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

The idea that we cause harm by doing what we perceive to be the right thing, that's another theme that interests me. Because most people don't intend to cause harm, they cause harm by doing the right thing - in their mind.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

The world of superheroes is black and white; the world of monsters is not. Sometimes you need evil to fight evil.

It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

A lot of the best villains are the ones that think they are right. That think they are the good guy.

I think there is something about a good person doing bad things for what they consider to be a good reason. Then the battle is on to almost prove to the audience that it's justified. How far can you go with that? How far can that character go before people won't accept it? Trying to walk to edge of that line is a challenge.

Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.