James Spader Quotes

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.

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

I think that we are all the heroes of our own story, and I think life comes in all shades of gray. Personally, I love movies that exist like this, where you think someone can behave both heroically and like a villain.

I think that there are just people who are hurting other people, sometimes for the best of intentions and sometimes for the worst. In different times in my life, I've been the hero and I've been the villain. I also think that we're all evil sometimes.

I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

The anti-hero or hero usually has a journey or quest so they are interesting as you find out what's going to happen, what they are looking for. What are they trying to do? Sometimes what they do is heroic or comes with a price or sacrifice or maybe the way they do things isn't so great and that's when they become anti-heroes. But the journey of an anti-hero combined with a good story done well is always worthwhile.

No one is entirely good or evil; that is what the Warrior thinks when he has a new opponent.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

No one wants to set out to be a hero, and discover that they've been a villain all along.

I learned the bad guys are not always bad, the good guys are not always good.

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

I love playing bad. But my whole thing is usually villains that don't know that they're evil.

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

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.

I'm attracted to those kinds of roles that could be good or could be bad, and you just don't know.

I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

Usually, characters that are doing something nefarious have some extra layers to them. The general rule is bad people don't necessarily think they are bad.

If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

That's sort of what I like about this character is that he's not the good guy, he's not truly the bad guy.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.