We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.
Moral issues rarely have yes or no answers. -Myles to Alanna when she asks about the Gift
The position of power and having to make decisions that you don't necessarily want to make is always good conflict and good drama.
Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
In statesmanship there are predicaments from which it is impossible to escape without some wrongdoing.
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
Most of the temptations that come to us to sell the soul come in connection with the getting of money.
Broadchurch' was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
