Quotes About Complexity

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

I'm not interested in being easy anymore. Readable, yes. Easy, no.

I'm not interested in a pretty world. It's boring to me. If you're lucky enough to get to play a character for a long time, it's life-changing.

What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.

I'm not interested in a character's goodness. I'm interested in what makes them human.

It works better if your lead character is complex and interesting and not perfect.

Multifaceted and textured characters are always more intriguing to me. You never really just want to play one note. It becomes a bit monotone and boring.

I don't like to play characters that are one note, and just the attractive girl in the film.

The characters, to me, in 'Homeland' are not one note in any way.

I didn't want Sadness to be just one note.

It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.

It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

The artistic world is one of high nuance.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.