Paul Sparks Quotes

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls.

I like characters who aren't typically heroic and come to some sort of epiphany about themselves.

Our better angels get clouded and we're more selfish than we should be, more anxious or neurotic or desperate or self-sabotaging. Crueler, even. But I do think there's hope for everyone... I think redemption is possible for anybody.

I love characters who are kind of haunted by their pasts, who struggle on despite their flaws, knowing that, at the end of the day, they're not going to shuffle off to those pearly gates.

We all have them, those parts of us that are the greatest parts of us and the worst parts of us. Sometimes we're put in circumstances and bad choices are made.

I always have the feeling in these low states that something good is about to happen. That's when I feel the fullest, the rawest, the closest to myself.

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.

I'm a sinner just like everybody else and I have my faults and I've been through my dark times in my life to where I wasn't walking the walk and talking the talk, or I may have been talking the talk, but I wasn't walking the walk.

I have a thing for working with wounded characters.

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

What it made me realize was that a show like this makes people look inside themselves. Because this crew guy isn't sitting there wishing the character would fight back. He's hoping that he would fight back.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

Anyone can identify with those moments in life where circumstances or people inform us that we've strayed from the path of our better nature and intentions. We know what that's like, and we resist it - so as not to feel like we're bad people.

Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.

I see myself out of my own eyes, which means I have no idea what's going on the other way around. I just think I try to be a good person - and I fail.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.

'Precious' is strangely uplifting. It goes down into the valley but it also goes to the mountain tops. A lot of difficult realities are explored in 'Precious,' but the peaks make the valleys and the valleys make the peaks.

You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain.

No person and no character is beyond redemption, ultimately. That's the great thing about playing a character that has kind of a dark side; there's room to explore the opposite.

I know I may have done some bad things, but I'm not a bad person.