Quotes About Complexity

The existance of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to maek the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime commited by its believers.

My anthropological back gets raised hackles with simple worlds and simple conflicts. Nothing's simple. Nothing ever was.

Crowd control.' 'Excuse me?' 'That's all civilization is, T'riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keep us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.

If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.

Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature.

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

You sleep with people all the time that you hate.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

One layer was certainly 17th century. The 18th century in him is obvious. There was the 19th century, and a large slice, of course, of the 20th century; and another, curious layer which may possibly have been the 21st.

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'

If you want to slice into America, it's pretty red, white, and blue in terms of how it goes about things, but there's a gray area there, and I've always been interested in where things are complicated.

Learning that someone is gay, queer, trans, doesn't tell you much by itself. They could be any kind of person aside from that particular slice of identity.

It feels like we're always juggling many pieces of information at once or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

It's slightly complicated for people to grasp the idea of a head of state in human form.

I don't mind playing somebody who's not likable, or makes the audience feel slightly conflicted.

'Game of Thrones' is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.

I don't believe songs that try to say everything in a simple slogan.