Quotes About Complexity

No one knows what women want!

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.

I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.

I'm true to myself, but I always have a soft spot for my husband no matter how nefarious I am.

Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses.

If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?

There was a time during 'Gone Girl' that I'd come home, and I'd say, 'I get to be every part of being a woman in this role.' For me, I feel it much more as a springboard for the work I'm going to take on thereafter.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.

Changing people's preconceptions is something you have to do in order to search for truth. Of course normally, that's not done because it also challenges social stability, and stories, as a result, are often told much more simply.

I mean, the thing with Simple Minds is that there's many Simple Minds within Simple Minds. There was definitely an electronic art-rock phase; a lot of people associate us with the big MTV pop age. Other people you talk to and they say 'Oh, Simple Minds are stadium rock.' I'll say, 'Hang on a minute, I think it can be all those things.'

There are things so deep and complex that only intuition can reach it in our stage of development as human beings. And to Poe... well, a great logician could be an enemy to him, what he called conventional world reason.

We all have different aspects of ourselves, and who we are to different people in our lives, at different stages of our lives.

To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.

Every constitutional standard is engaged in difficult but important line-drawing.

From a purely craft standpoint, a simple character has a single motivation, while complex characters have two or three or more motivations, at least one of which is in direct conflict with another.

The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.

Only six men in the world know about relativity. I am not one of them. When I ask them to explain, they confused me.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Fairly examined, truly understood, No man is wholly bad, nor wholly good.