Quotes About Complexity

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

I don't like sympathetic characters.

I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

My wheelhouse is intense characters who have a certain sympathetic streak and also a sense of humor.

I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.

I have come to know Diana better than anyone else, so my sympathy will always lie with her. But I also have a huge appreciation of Charles, and what they both had to endure in that marriage. I don't think you can pick a side.

It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.

I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It's too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.

It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

But Gulf War Syndrome is not one cause, not one illness. It is many causes, many illnesses.

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

The civil war in Syria is complex and devastating.

The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops.

If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.