Quote

Villains are meant to be hated.

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.

In reality, there are very few villains who view themselves as villains. They just have a certain agenda at a certain time.

Villains are a lot of fun. My villains have a lot of tongue-in-cheek. They are sometimes conscious of and a little bit gleeful of their villainy.

I understand being the villain is what people like. People play to that. They want to know about the villain.

Both villains and heroes are a bit boring, really, unless they're flawed and broken somehow. If they're not flawed and broken, then clearly they need to be broken and made flawed. That's what an author does if he or she has any dignity.

I don't personally believe that villains exist. Villains are just a way of saying that somebody has an opposing conviction.

I'm a villain. But hey, villains have fans, too. They might have more fans than the heroes, and I'm OK with that.