Patrick Ness Quotes

I do love that witches haven't really been explored that much. Usually, witches are the little side character... a bad female character that comes in and leaves.

The number of witches had everywhere become enormous.

The Reign of the Witches

Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.

Doctor Strange is selfish but he's still saving lives.

Through all the bad guys that I've played, they're justifiably bad - they have their reasons. It's been important to me.

It's very tricky to throw a morally flexible character onto the screen and have an audience empathize. It's always an exercise in restraint.

Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad.

It's a bit like the search for witches. You can always find them.

This is the first case of it’s kind since we stopped trying people for witchcraft.

Those … who let the witches escape, or who do not punish them with the utmost rigor, may rest assured that they will be abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches. And the country which shall tolerate this will be scourged with pestilences, famines, and wars.

As the true magnitude of the witch problem became more apparent, the Church enlisted the Inquisition, an applied institution specifically designed to address pressing social concerns. The Inquisition became the growth industry of the day, offering exciting work, rapid advancement, and wide recognition to its professional and technical workers. Its creative and energetic efforts to create a witch-free world unearthed dangers in the most unlikely places; the rates of witch identification, assessment and evaluation soared.

Medieval Europeans did not much fear witches until they created an inquisition to find them.

When it came to the burning of witches, Germany was home to a kind of pre-Holocaust, where at least 100,000 people were executed for witchcraft, usually by public burning.

I am constantly interested in people who society calls 'bad' because I don't like to just buy into something that everybody's going to say. I want to investigate that for myself. With a character, you get to fully investigate that emotionally and understand the parts of them that are in pain and scared and are good. That's human.

You can't judge a character, and you're never going to always play characters that are morally sound or know right from wrong.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt.

I think you can learn a lot from primary sources. 'The Penguin Book of Witches,' which is edited by novelist Katherine Howe, is a wonderful compilation of primary sources about witchcraft.

I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do.

I think the parts that I played sort of broke the mould in terms of - you know, I played grey characters, the bad girl with a good heart, there was a good reason for her to be bad.

When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.

There are a lot of things you do in a supernatural universe that can toe the line and cross the line.

There is something very exciting when you're playing a villain. You're being a rebel within the story because you are breaking the norms, and also when it comes to the structure of what a conventional lead is supposed to be.