William Shakespeare - The Sopranos TV - Get Carter 1971 - Mel Brooks - Faulks on Fiction TV - Stephen Birkoff - Charles Dickens - Wilkie Collins - Soman Chainani - John Locke - Marilyn Manson - Floyd Mayweather - Clive Barker - Alfred Hitchcock - Mary Wollstonecraft - Oliver Reed - Hugh Grant - Peter Coyote - Tom Berenger - Christopher Marlowe -
Despiteful and intolerable wrongs!
Shall I endure this monstrous villainy? William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus IV iv 50-51, Saturnius to Clown
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. William Shakespeare, Richard III I i 28
The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice III i 76
Fools do those villains pity who are punished
Ere they have done their mischief. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear IV ii 53-54, Albany
No-one plays a tough ruthless hard-hearted prick like you do. The Sopranos s6e7: Luxury Lounge, Little Carmine to Ben Kingsley, with Chris, starring James Gandolfini & Lorriane Bracco & Edie Falco & Michael Imperioli & Dominic Chianese & Steven van Zandt & Tony Sirico & Robert Iler et al, Little Carmine to Ben Kingsley, HBO 2006
I’m the villain in the family, remember. Get Carter 1971 starring Michael Caine & Ian Hendry & John Osborne & Britt Ekland & Bryan Mosley & George Sewell & Tony Beckley & Glynn Edwards & Alun Armstrong et al, director Mike Hodges, Jack
A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. Mel Brooks
In the real world villains alarm us. But what we find repugnant in life can in a novel become oddly alluring. The fictional villain can say things we can’t. And can do things we don’t. This makes them the characters we most enjoy. But the great thing about villains in the novel is that they know what is going on. Faulks on Fiction 4/4: The Villains, BBC 2011
The villain is the author’s accomplice driving the plot forward. ibid.
The fictional villain could resemble a hero. ibid.
There is no doubt who is the star of the show, and that is Fagin. ibid.
But Dickens didn’t only make Fagin a nasty piece of work. He also made him a Jew. And that was a decision that would trouble him for the rest of his life. ibid.
Now the villain was to be an even more unlikely figure, one who initially looks like an angel in Paradise. At first sight it would seem an idyllic setting. An island deserted apart from a handful of innocent schoolboys. Yet it was here that William Golding proposed to look evil straight in the face. And that face belonged to perhaps the most shocking villain in British fiction - a twelve-year-old choirboy called Jack Meridew. ibid.
The villain’s only weapon is pain. Stephen Birkoff
The hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved, crawling forth by night in search of some rich offal for a meal. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
He looks like a man who would tame anything. If he had married a tigress instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; viz also film 1997
I am a bad man who says what others only think. ibid.
She had always found villains more exciting than heroes. They had ambition, passion. They made the stories happen. Villains didn’t fear death. No, they wrapped themselves in death like suits of armor! As she inhaled the school’s graveyard smell, Agatha felt her blood rush. For like all villains, death didn’t scare her. It made her feel alive. Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil
An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; a villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards. John Locke
I’m not a role model. I’m a role villain. Marilyn Manson
You’ve got to have a villain and they’ll always make me a villain. I’m used to it – it makes me work harder and it makes me fight harder. Floyd Mayweather junior
I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain. Clive Barker
The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. Alfred Hitchcock
The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized. Mary Wollstonecraft
I’m not a villain. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’m just a tawdry character who explodes now and again. Oliver Reed
You know everyone loves to be the villain. Hugh Grant
There has to be that feeling in a good villain – that he’s awesome, he has his own power; that he is, in several senses, unstoppable. Peter Coyote
You can’t think that you’re playing a villain, or you’ll end up with a cartoon. You have to think about him as a person and a hero. Tom Berenger
Now I will show myself
To have more of the serpent than the dove;
That is – more knave than fool. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta II iii