Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Perry

There is a small thrill in the casualness of "I do like" paired with the loaded punch of "evil characters". The sentence reads like a shrug, which is exactly the point: Perry frames darkness as a creative preference, not a moral confession. That tonal mismatch gives the line its charge. It invites the audience to stop treating artists like potential suspects and start seeing craft choices for what they are: ways of testing how far a story can go before it breaks.

As a musician speaking about books, Perry is also smuggling in a familiar pop-arts truth: the stage persona and the private self are not the same organism. Pop culture keeps demanding authenticity, then panics when an artist admits they’re drawn to ugly motives. "Explore" is the operative word. It’s not "celebrate" or "justify"; it’s excavation. Evil becomes a terrain to map, a sound to sample, a rhythm to write against. In a moment when audiences want clean heroes and algorithm-friendly morality, that insistence on complication reads as a quiet act of resistance.

The subtext is practical, even self-protective. Evil characters are narrative engines: they generate conflict, pressure-test the protagonist, and expose the social rules everyone else pretends are natural. Perry’s line also gestures at a cultural hunger: we keep returning to villains because they make visible what politeness edits out - appetite, grievance, fear, the pleasure of control. The artist isn’t endorsing any of it; he’s admitting where the voltage is.