Jodi Picoult Quotes

Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.

A character is never entirely white or black, there's never entirely right or wrong. You have to realize sometimes you face something, and then you change your mind, or then you realize you were wrong.

There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren't bad people. They all have their justifications.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

I don't believe anyone is good or bad. It's about the choices we make, about how we deal with situations.

The world is made up of good and evil, and everybody has their own take, and everybody thinks they are on the good side, and a very few, select group of us will admit that we come from the dark side.

I don't believe in good people and bad people.

I have been allowed to inhabit different shades of human nature and different colours of truth indifferent circumstances.

We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.

I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.

Maybe we are both good people who've done some bad things.

One of my themes is that there is good and evil in everyone. I was not out to make these guys heroes. I really don't believe in heroes. The best of people have a dark side and it's a constant struggle for the better side to survive and to thrive.

When I see big movies that are only about good versus evil, and the good guy wins, I only can think we're in a far more complicated world than that. I frankly think that this binary philosophy is actually a dangerous way to look at the world.

And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong.

I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

Being capable of anything is a bullshit concept, unless it means you also admit that you're capable of cheating, lying and killing.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

No one is anything but a shade of grey. It's good people making bad choices.