Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.

It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.

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

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

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.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

There is much said about the wickedness of doing evil that good may come. Alas! there is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

It doesn't make sense to have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.

Desperate? That can be a justification for all kinds of behavior.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

I wish you well and I hope it will be a huge hit, because that would be very good for me. And if, God forbid, it's a terrible flop, well that would be very good for me.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

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

I've never seen any character I've ever played as a bad guy or a good guy.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

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

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.