Peter Falk Quotes

There are always two forces warring against each other within us.

It's not like you make a decision and everything inside you is 100 percent happy.

I'm not sure if I'd call myself an extrovert. I think I'm a bit contradictory. I like being endearing and venomous at the same time. I guess it's one part of myself fighting against the other part, proving that I'm not that nice all the time.

I'm a child of extremes.

There's a softer and harder person in everyone, depending on the time.

two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.

The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.

I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.

I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

If you look at my body of work, there's always a dark side to my characters. They've always got a skeleton in the closet; they've always got a subtext.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

I am a terrible mixture of being organized, controlling, but chaotic. My desk is monstrous.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.

My wife would say I'm more Hyde than Jekyll!

To steal a term from one of my Twitter followers, 'Deathlok' is the 'anti-villain.' He's on the side of the bad guys, but he obviously doesn't want to be there.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.

I've always been an angel. Sometimes I transform into a witch only because the filmmaking demands it.

As an actor, the second and last ones were interesting for me. Because those parts had the most change in playing someone who was both light and dark, sort of Jekyl and Hyde.

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.