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I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.

My hope is that each of the villains I write will have his or her own motivation that readers can understand, whether they agree or disagree.

I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

When you are a hero you are always running to save someone, sweating, worried and guilty. When you are a villain you are just lurking in the shadows waiting for the hero to pass by. Then you pop them in the head and go home... piece of cake.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person - they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted. They're motivated.

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.