Bob Morley Quotes

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

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

I think that quite often you can only find a choice between bad and worse. But I think it's worth making the effort, and I like to expose my characters to that sort of situation.

Before 'Wings' came out, I told a few people that at the end of book one, readers should think Laurel made the right choice. Then, at the end of 'Spells,' they should understand why Laurel made the choice she did.

Where great evils lie on all sides, it is very difficult to follow the best counsel.

Oftentimes the easy decision and comfortable decision is not the right one.

Early in my career I had to be a goon to survive. I did everything I had to do and probably some things I shouldn't have.

In my own life, I'm pretty good at choosing between good and bad. It's the choices between good and good I find the most difficult to make.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

The thing that intrigued me about 'Breaking Bad' from day one was the idea of taking a character and transforming him.

Gray space is fertile ground for fiction. When I can see both sides of an argument and feel strongly in both directions, then there's a story there, then I can write real characters that I care about and believe in and champion on both sides.

I think most people are not willing to make the tough choices.

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.

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

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.

The trick to making a story matter is that every now and then, somebody you care about has to go. If it's somebody that you don't care about, then it doesn't really have - the stakes aren't there. But if you do that every now and then, then the story matters to people. And there are actual stakes involved, emotional stakes.

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.