Steven Moffat Quotes

Every character thinks differently, and every character has a different energy and way that they tick. But to find a character like Kai, who is so far that he doesn't even feel things, he is so different from me. That is the most exciting part.

The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people--life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.

Let's clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

Walter is incredibly complex. I do a lot of thinking about the work I do, and try to get the rhythms of scenes.

For me, playing a vampire isn't about the fact that they're a vampire, it's about who they are specifically.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

The first thing I thought [when I read the script] was that Frasier was an intellectual at some points but also an Everyman - flawed and very insecure.

A lot of actors say that no villain wants to be a villain, generally. They don't might being evil, maybe, but they have an agenda that they can justify. Otherwise, a little bit of that tension goes, if you're just a villain and everyone hates you because you're mean.

I hate these questions - I don't like talking about this stuff [popular culture], because it's so... to me, it's so ordinary.

When Alan Rickman, a dear friend of mine, played villains, he always made it complicated. He didn't redeem what they did, but he made you feel that it was hard for them to be so horrible.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

I like complex characters. I've been very, very lucky to portray, in these past three years, characters that are strong and fragile at the same time. It's those characters that I'm looking for. In the last year and half I played three different religions, and that allowed me to educate myself so much.

I have trouble describing characters because there is just too much going on in human beings.

I did absolutely love playing Tabaqui, the hyena, who is morally conflicted and a villain, but also quite sweet.

You rarely get a tentpole that has this much emotional depth, this much character to dive into.

Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

I enjoy bringing humanity to complex characters.

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

The fascinating thing about Game of Thrones is that none of the badasses are just badasses, and none of the wimps are just wimps. A coward will surprise you with courage, and a very powerful person will blindside you with weakness, and the most evil person is capable of the most compassionate moment.

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

I personally kind of yearn to play characters who are complex and who strike a truthful chord in me and who are challenged in some way and, I guess, who kind of move through those challenges.