Related quotes
“She worked for the villain and believed in the villain, but she ain’t the villain.”
The Paris Review interview (1994)
Context: I was performing The Sea Lion in the Newport Performing Arts Center. Afterwards a white-haired old woman approached me and said, Hey, you remember me? I looked her over, and I knew I remembered her, but had no idea who she was. She said, Lois. It still didn’t click. She said, Lois Learned, Big Nurse, and I thought, Oh my God. She was a volunteer at Newport, long since retired from the nursing business. This was the nurse on the ward I worked on at the Menlo Park hospital. I didn’t know what to think and she didn’t either, but I was glad she came up to me. I felt there was a lesson in it, the same one I had tried to teach Hollywood. She’s not the villain. She might be the minion of the villain, but she’s really just a big old tough ex-army nurse who is trying to do the best she can according to the rules that she has been given. She worked for the villain and believed in the villain, but she ain’t the villain.
“Villain, a horse--
Villain, I say, give me a horse to fly,
To swim the river, villain, and to fly.”
Battle of Alcazar (acted 1588-1589, printed 1594), act V, l:104, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Published anonymously, but attributed with much probability to Peele.
Letter to Groucho Marx, published in The Groucho Letters
quoted in The New York Times, March 6, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/us/politics/06hillary.html?pagewanted=1&hp
Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 3, section 2, "Faucelme"
