Quotes About Complexity

When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.

I get tired of hearing people, well-meaning people, talking about African-American kids or Hispanic kids as if they're all the same. Which isn't true. There is a very diverse group of people in both groups in terms of income, objectives in life, aspirations, cultural wants, habits, all the things that make us unique Americans.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

Being really likeable all the time is just not real life, so it's your duty to make a well-rounded character.

I loved 'Tin Cup' because even though that character had her own career and was strong, she was pretty confused. I think she was my favorite character because she was well-rounded. She didn't have it all together.

I want to play a range, from victims to strong people, just as long as it's a well-rounded character. And it's not a woman who's just there for the purpose of the man.

'The Slap' is not like anything else. It's an incredibly well-written novel that has been turned into a great and intriguing series that reveals both less and more about each character than you learn in the book. It's a novel that has been given a second chance to live.

I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.

The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,' and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.

I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base, but it seems like my staff as well as the audience, doesn't quite realize that this has happened. Don't tell them about it.

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

One of the elements in the film that really fascinated me was not to look at the world in bi-polar terms of us vs them or east vs west, which was a by-product of the Cold War.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

The great western error about the Taliban is to assume homogeneity.

Democracy is extremely complex; it is extremely concrete. It's about constantly choosing, finding, developing practical options within the common good. Constantly searching for how to express in a practical way the common good, not in some grand way, some grand and absolute way, but in a very comfortable way.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Prayer is so complicated.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

The great advantage of the Lib Dems is precisely that no-one knows what they stand for.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

When you're dealing with new and emerging diseases, you have no idea and you can't predict in advance what would happen.

The most real characters in a great play are those who are so meticulously drawn that the audience could predict how many pairs of shoes they might have in their closet or how many close friends they had in grade school. Have any of our public figures been as fully developed in the media?

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.