Russell T Davies Quotes

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

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

There are movies where we are interested in seeing people's lives without agreeing with what they're doing.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.

I don't play the role of a villain, really, but I like playing anti-hero kind of roles. I like characters where there's conflict, drama, and more personal investment than just being heroes.

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

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.

I like to show the grey area in all my characters.

I think that quite often you can only find a choice between bad and worse. But I think it's worth making the effort, and I like to expose my characters to that sort of situation.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

I feel like, sometimes, characters that are just good and nice can seem boring or uninteresting.

In war there are no easy choices.

I don't think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

That's just what 'The 100' does. They like to put their characters in a position where no decision is the right one, you know? You have to kind of just hope that it works out.

With all due respect to the other writers, I don't want to disparage any other writers; I don't want to have to invent a bigger villain than Deathstroke so Deathstroke can seem heroic fighting this bigger villain. I'd rather just have Deathstroke be who is, and he's kind of a bastard.

Badlapur' is a drama, a character-driven story. It is not so much about plot.

I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.

It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.

Sometimes there are good reasons to do bad things.

To ground a character in reality, you have to use shades of gray.

I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.