Thomas Harris Quotes

I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

None of my on-screen roles have been outright negative. They have all been grey, and that is how it is in reality, too. None of us are nice and sweet 24/7.

Good and evil lay side by side.

More than one side? You're Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man!... Midway from nothing to the Deity!

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

No matter how horrid a person may appear on the surface, if you dig deeper, you will find some nice, unexpected little quality.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex.

In real life, I don't think anybody is all one shade. People who are perceived to be really good have bad thoughts and inclinations that they sometimes act on, I'm sure, and people have different sides to themselves.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

We have the ability to attract and repel at the same time, which I think you should embrace. Otherwise, you're just going to be, like, this Neil Diamond act.

We are all somewhere or the other a little grey, not black and white. We have our imperfections.

I am a man who is noble. I have a good heart, but at the same time, I'm a little malicioso. There's no way of hiding that side.

People are three-dimensional. They're not good or bad. They're not righteous or unrighteous. They are a million different things.

I think you can have varied and seemingly contradictory depictions of a single person because we all have many facets and, in a way, many selves.

I think the most interesting characters are those in which you can see both sides.

I don't think anyone is purely evil or purely brilliant, certainly for Prince Charles.

Great parts produce great vices as well as virtues.

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

Good can still exist when bad things happen, just as evil persists when good things happen.” - Carter to Georgina

There’s an Iago and a Romeo within all of us. There is that lover, and there is that sociopath.