Quotes About Complexity

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

I don't believe really good plays - interesting plays, complicated plays - can mean just one thing to every single person in the audience.

I always find my emotions all over the map, not so much a single thing overriding the rest.

Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.

It's cool to play a sinister bad guy who also has a human side.

I'm glad nobody has asked me to adapt 'Wuthering Heights' because I think I would make a mess of it. Everybody makes a mess of it. I think the Bronte Sisters are mad.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

I can't fly a flag for monogamy or whatever the opposite is; it depends on the person and on the situation.

There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.

I think that every person has many, many people inside of them. We change our personality depending on who we are talking to or what situation we are in.

You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

There's a certain gravity in Stokes, due to the situations I have to handle.

I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.

I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.

All my six husbands married me for different reasons.

That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life's matter in all its aspects.

A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That's a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

I think it's good that we're talking about it, but I think there's still a gendered nature to the way that people see female directors' skill sets. And I think we need to keep examining that. I don't know if people know how complicated the issue really is.