Life & Wisdom Quote by Stephen Hopkins

That casual “certainly” is doing a lot of work: it frames darkness not as a dramatic confession but as a settled fact, the kind you admit the way you admit you get hungry or jealous. Hopkins isn’t posturing as a tortured genius; he’s normalizing the machinery that polite conversation tries to pretend isn’t running. The move is strategic for a writer. If you want to write characters who feel alive, you can’t treat cruelty, envy, lust for power, or the urge to sabotage as exotic diseases found only in “bad people.” You treat them as baseline weather.

The second clause, “and, I think, in most people,” shifts the line from self-disclosure to indictment-with-an-out. “I think” softens the claim just enough to avoid sounding like a sermon, but the implication is blunt: the reader isn’t exempt. It’s an invitation to complicity, which is precisely what good storytelling often depends on. We keep turning pages when we recognize ourselves in a character’s worst split-second thoughts, then feel uneasy about recognizing it.

Context matters here too. Coming from a writer, the remark doubles as a defense of imagination. To admit dark impulses is to justify why your mind goes there, why fiction needs to go there, why moral clarity in art can feel like propaganda. The subtext isn’t “I’m dangerous”; it’s “I’m honest about the materials.” That honesty is less comforting than confession, and more useful: it argues that decency isn’t an essence but an act, performed against a background hum we all carry.