Rupert Everett Quotes

Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; - although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

If you look at my body of work, there's always a dark side to my characters. They've always got a skeleton in the closet; they've always got a subtext.

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

I love that Barry Seal is working for the CIA, and he's an awful liar. It just goes to how honest this character is at the end of the day, even as he rips off the country and the world to the tune of becoming one of the wealthiest men in America. There's an innate honesty, a purity to him.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

What's interesting about the movie and characters is that they're one thing to the world and another thing in their heads.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

There is good and bad in everyone.

as I get older there is nothing more constantly astonishing to me than the goodness of the Bad; - unless it is the badness of the Good.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness

Then let me put it to you this way. There is seldom black and white in our world. Sometimes things we perceive as good have moments of profound evil, but profound evil will always tell you that it’s always good. It never admits that it could, in any way, be evil. (Alexion)

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king.