Quotes About Complexity

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered.

Anytime you really take a close look at people who are dealing with the aging process, you're going to have a complicated reaction to what you're seeing and feeling. If you're in the middle of it, those emotions are going to be quadrupled. It's immediate, it's relatable, so it's good human drama.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

We don't need to dumb down our stuff. And it's important to know how far we can push readers.

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

One of the most common criticisms of romance is that the genre is too prescribed: If every romance novel ends happily ever after, don't the stories lack complexity? Don't the readers get bored?

Readers let me know that they like books that have more to them than meets the eye. Had they not let me know that, I never would have written 'The View From Saturday.'

Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough.

If you ever had the misfortune of reading all 2,000 pages of Dodd-Frank, which I have done - and it almost killed me - basically, all it does is create a list of all the things it wants the Fed to fix.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.

People who aren't complicated in real life come through as pretty bland on the screen. Most great performers are not very happy and well adjusted. Perhaps that's the price they pay for being originals.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

Part of me has always wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe or any Fifties Hollywood starlet. On screen, they seemed so sexy and simple and looked after. In real life, I'm none of those things. But I'd rather be fierce and complicated.