Quotes About Complexity

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

It wasn't my intention in going after this part but I suppose now I do. The adult roles are a lot meatier - you're not always just the daughter or the girlfriend or whatever.

As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

I suppose I do have an interest in stories that show complexity.

You can be a sophisticated person and still have really old ideas about what love is supposed to look like.

To be sure, American higher education is a diverse ecosystem, comprising institutions of all sizes, price tags, and mission statements.

Institutions are imperfect. Governments surely are. People are.

There are surely times when a conservative and a liberal would agree. We would agree on how moral it is to discriminate on the basis of race. There's absolutely no light between those two positions. It becomes a little more complex when you talk about law as opposed to morality.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don't really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it's way more intricate than what meets the surface.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

When people think fashion is just the surface of things, I disagree very politely.

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.

On the surface I look fragile and insecure; you have to know me very well.

Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.

L.A. is a very strange place. On the surface, it has an innocent appearance, like the stranger with the pleasant face that smiles and shakes your hand. But then you learn it is actually a lot less nice than you think, and there's a whole deeper, darker level.

I love that people are still obsessively trying to understand and decode 'The Shining.' People want to find meaning in things that seemingly don't have meaning on the surface.

This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.

I think the films that work the best are the ones that seem to be about one thing but then, under the surface, bubbling away, are lots more important questions that you're not really aware of, and when you leave the cinema, your mind is ablaze with different thoughts!

Our darkest angels in Europe are always somewhere under the surface.

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.