Quotes About Complexity

I think it's human nature to say, 'You're a wrestler. That is what you do.' I think it can be hard sometimes for people to understand that you can have more than one thing you like to do.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.

I don't care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don't have an intuitive feeling for equations.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

The code of life is like a Beethoven symphony. We have not yet learned how to write music like that. But evolution does it very well. I am learning how to use evolution to compose new music.

But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

Maven is very much a haunting presence in 'Glass Sword.' His influence is everywhere, and he dogs Mare and Cal like no other. He's my favorite character to write because he's so complex, but also because he affects everyone else so deeply. He's kind of like the source of gravity. Everyone moves around him and what he's done.

Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there'd be celestial-mechanics jokes.

I always do a lot of work around characters to make them real people because, oftentimes, they really are a sliver of a person. Even with truly wonderful writers, women characters are there to emote, and they're often incredibly chaste or worthy. Or they're a 'different type of woman', which is the worst.

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.

For me, Paul Simon has always been an incredible songwriter, as he writes very complicated songs that sound very simple, and he makes it look so easy when it's not.

When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Jack Thorne writes so well for messed-up teenage girls.

I love Bill Finn's stuff. It's so rewarding for an actor. It's conversational but intricate. He writes some beautiful, simple songs and melodies, but he also writes this cacophony for people.

That's my main complaint with Murakami: that he writes these complex males and then really static women.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.