Quotes About Duality

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

I have always found myself playing the hero, but I love villains. Villains have more fun.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

I would love to play a villain someday in that I think that what I've done with my whole career is walk this tightrope between charming and creepy, and I always fall on the charming side. I'd like to fall on the creepy side and be like one of those scary old men, like really charming villains.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

I know, it's disturbing that gentle looking people have such violence, but I believe we all have a penchant for violence in us.

I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

I see 'Jekyll' as a very scary comedy thriller, partly because Hyde is violent and frightening as a character but at the same time he's very funny - and that's quite an achievement.

My wife loves to get all dressed up and go out, and I'm this gloomy Virgo. It works because of the mutual recognition that we are two democratic narcissists. She does what she has to do, and I do what I have to do. We respect that.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

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

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

I am British. I love Britain for all its faults and all its virtues. My husband is American and I am largely based in Los Angeles, but whenever someone asks me where home is, I automatically say 'London.'

Every fellow is really two men -- what he is and what he might be; and you're never absolutely sure which you're going to bury till he's dead.

Nature could be both wondrous and cruel, creating immense beauty and then offsetting it with ugliness.

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

Bérénice avait deux visages, cette nuit et ce jour.