Quotes About Complexity

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

People called me a hoodlum and a thug. But they didn't tell you I was a carpenter, an architect, a stand-up comic - even a bartender. And a barbecue cook. But they didn't tell you that.

I'm no longer going to play thugs or debauched cops that I can't possibly make complex characters. I'm bigger than that. I owe too much to too many good people at the Goodman, Arena and Playwrights Horizons.

What excited me to do 'Thugs of Hindostan' was to make a film in the large format about a character, who is not inherently noble.

I'm a problem solver. I love people. The more complicated they are, the more I get into them, and I just want to understand what makes them tick.

Every character thinks differently, and every character has a different energy and way that they tick. But to find a character like Kai, who is so far that he doesn't even feel things, he is so different from me. That is the most exciting part.

I'm very interested in what makes people tick; people are so weird and complicated.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

In the old days, you would have one lawyer to handle everything: speeding tickets, buying a house, contracts, litigation, real estate, copyrights, leasing, entertainment, intellectual property, forensic accounting, criminal offenses... the list goes on. Now, you have to have a separate lawyer for each one of those categories!

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

In the real world, answers may not be clear cut. There will be messy choices, and you're not going to be able to construct a policy response in a neat and tidy way. Being able to listen to other people, even as you stay true to your principles, that's how you actually succeed.

Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, 'Well if I can just do that, then everything's going to be okay.' My work differs in that I don't offer quick solutions and simple explanations.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.

The body is a pretty complete and self-contained instrument. If you are fascinated by machines, there isn't a better one!

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

It is not that science is failing us. It is simply that the solution is as complex and multifaceted as the illness itself. For every theory of its causes, there is another to contradict it; for every new treatment, there is another that dismisses it as ineffective. This is not deliberate obstruction. Depressive illness, as well as being complex, is highly individual. What works for one person does not work for another. And often there is no explanation why this is so.

We are not computers; we cannot download information about God or life by direct transfer. Life is beautiful and barren and impossibly complex. Books and conferences help us think about our lives, but most of life is not thinking about life—it's living through

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. PSALM 139:13-14,

I wish I could unpick the stitches of time that have become all tangled and twisted together.

There are some wives who require but a sentence. There are some who require a book. You, Miss Clarke, would require volumes.

How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs--no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer's intent--exclude aspects of the moment's complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.