The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or...

Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks . . . which I rejected due to financial investment.

The villains were always ugly in books and movies. Necessarily so, it seemed. Because if they were attractive—if their looks matched their charm and their cunning—they wouldn’t only be dangerous.They would be irresistible.

In the world of so-called villains, what we need is not another hero. What we need is to stop the influx of people who dress themselves as menaces and proceed to harm others.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

He who profits by villainy, has perpetrated it.

But see you, we should travel by night. Dark times for dark business, as they says. No sun to bother Valeriana or you, Kaylana’s surely no’ disadvantaged, and I know I work better in darkness....

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and...

Lorsen shook his head in amazement. ‘You truly are disgusting.”I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who...