Quotes About Complexity

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you're from Nigeria, then you're the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.

Yes, negotiating is about money and the bottom line, but a lot of times, it's much more emotional and complex than that. Realizing that the economic outcome may not be the other party's top priority gives you more chips to play with and will enable you to achieve better results than you may have anticipated.

You have to have this straddling balance of realizing that games are incredibly complex. You can have an idea of where you want to go with something, the structure of something, but the actual moment to moment figuring all this out-it unravels over the course of, in 'God of War''s case, about five years.

You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.

What people are now realizing is that this formula that technology destroys jobs and creates jobs, even if it's basically true, it's too simplistic.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.

I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Human beings rarely do things for a binary reason.

We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

Every actor I know - any reasonable actor I know - is complicated. What you see and what they are, those are two very different things.

If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

Every character has their reasons - even the characters who do dumb things.

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

Through all the bad guys that I've played, they're justifiably bad - they have their reasons. It's been important to me.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

I've been working on Barb for a while. I looked at her as a sort of every woman. She's incredibly strong; she's incredibly generous. She's seemingly insane because she is in the situation of a polygamous relationship, but she had definite reasons to do it.

There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.

During all of my writing career - this includes when I was writing plays and my other screenplays - I don't recall ever writing a negative character, which does not mean that my characters aren't flawed or do not make mistakes. In actual fact, they all are quite flawed.