Quotes About Complexity

I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

People sometimes complain and it can feel like they think we want to lose. We're not machines where one plus one is always two.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

Music is not always going to be a mechanical math equation, where it's one plus one equals two. It's not always that simple.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

In little localized pockets, the universe is capable of building some beautiful complexity.

There are different pockets of the rural U.S. and each one of those has their own colour, their own language, the things they're worried about. They're so different.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.

I like poems that are complex.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

We always see the point of an iceberg. So I've always accepted the idea that people - they don't necessarily know everything I am.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

I don't write scenes where one person is right and one person is wrong. It's very much by design that everyone has a point of view that you as an audience member can understand.

In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.

I want to look at this character from all points of view. I know I don't want to make them all good or all bad or all anything... the story itself often helps create the character.

There were, and still are, a lot of different points of view in the gay community. It's not everybody holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya.' People have very different perspectives.