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I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.

In some ways, what I learned is that you can take a character and breathe with them, and it's up to the audience to interpret rather than you putting moral stamp on the character.

I like for there to be a moral, for the character to have gotten something out of the experience.

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

A heroic nature is very Greek.

It's good to know that other people think differently, and that's what makes the characters interesting.

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.