Quotes About Ambiguity

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered.

I think that battle that you have almost never goes away. You're always questioning and hoping that stuff goes a certain way, that you get a certain reaction.

Sometimes I'm not even really quite sure why I do what I do - do I do it because I like to show that I'm an educated person to exploit these certain things artistically and, in my opinion, in a very smart way - or am I just a punk rock brat that likes pushing people's buttons and relishing in the negative reaction? I can't tell.

Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

It's interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although 'The Giver' does have an ambiguous ending. I've heard about that from readers over the years.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.

I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.

I have no illusions of the future. Or maybe it's all illusion. I don't know. I've always been ready for it.

I think part of that is to create an environment where it's like real life, where you don't really know what's going to happen to you in a certain scene.

One thing I have realised is that there are no certainties. Anything can happen anytime.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

Two women? God, man. Well, I'm still living. So clearly I must've gotten away with it, when I did do it. But I don't think it's time to blow my cover now.

When I graduated I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want a conventional career.

When I graduated from Brown, I had a very limited conception of jobs, careers, and what I wanted to do. Basically, I figured I should do some kind of thought work that paid well, but I wasn't sure what.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.