Quotes About Contradiction

Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

She can be ornery now and then, vain for sure, petulant and impetuous, silly at times, ill disposed toward the help, even malicious and malevolent when angry, but, still, she has always been the one for me.

Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?" "I'm an American.

In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut's Jewish neighborhood. There is no contradiction.

I'm not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

to justify their own spilling of ink they spell the day as night

The child gets two confusing messages when a parent tells him which is the right fork to use, and then proceeds to use the wrong one. So does the child who listens to parents bicker and fuss, yet is told to be nice to his brothers and sisters.

The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality.

What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values my parents, among others, well-meaningly bequeathed me—the cross-dressing values of my father, and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.

We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.

I like characters who have two different things going on, whether it is Robin from 'Top Of The Lake' having that strength juxtaposed with the vulnerability and being in pain, or whether it is Peggy from 'Mad Men' with her naivety and her sort of idiocy at times, combined with her intelligence and courage really to do what she did at that time.

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

We took Big Pun, a 700-lb Spanish guy, one of the greatest rappers ever, and made him a sex symbol. Women would wait on line to kiss him.

Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.

I'm a walking, talking enigma. We're a dying breed.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.

Nobody is totally white in Brazil.

The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.

I never wear a black belt with a black shoe. It's always the opposite: a brown shoe with a black belt.

I like films that take their time a little bit more and don't show you all of their cards right away, characters that are conflicted and contradicting and seem one way at first and then suddenly turn out to be something else.