Quotes About Complexity

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.

Hey, it's a miracle to have a career in Hollywood. But it doesn't begin to sum me up.

I was asked by a journalist to sum up the story in a minute, and I was like, 'No.' It goes from Trump to Brexit to Russian espionage to military operations in Afghanistan to hacking the president of Nigeria. Where do you even begin?

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.

We inhabit an obscure planet, in an obscure galaxy, around an obscure sun, but on the other hand, modern human society represents one of the most complex things we know.

The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.

Commercial real estate is really a black box: its super opaque, and it's hard to get the information.

Puppets interacting with other puppets is super complicated. You're juggling ten balls instead of three.

I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems - if they don't overwhelm - the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this 'now' moment where a superficial grace is so available.

Socialism and Communism are extremely attractive to a superficial observer. It is not until you get into the details, or actually experience it, that it becomes apparent that it does not work.

I would love to see women be able to be powerful, complex, smart, opinionated and taken seriously, even if they are beautiful. Even more, I would love to see women held to different standards, other than the superficial ones that we're held to.

I don't really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype.

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult.

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

but those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.

For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.

Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.

People have tended to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.

Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.