Quotes About Complexity

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

When I told my son that I had to give a talk about my work to non-mathematicians, he warned me that regular people don't think like mathematicians.

Now, people have a hard time understanding how taxes work.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.

Marriage is an an inherently contradictory state. It involves the fusion of two people into one thing. And it's also love, and it's a lot of work, and it's got glory in its drudgery.

We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

I truly think any preparation you do only helps and adds dimension and complexity to the work [as an actor].

When people don't understand my work, I don't feel like explaining.

I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.

The more shaded, flawed characters that are struggling, I think there's something very relatable about that.

One of the things that I really enjoyed playing with Ender was how he's constantly struggling between his brother and his sister. It's like he's got two sides to him. And I've always wanted to play a darker character, and in this film and in the novel, Ender has his moments where he isn't a glorified hero.

I, in particular, am in a confusing spot because I am Indian, but I am white, which people don't get. So often I find myself struggling to explain my Indianness.

When I was in high school, I was a bad kid and a good student.

I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system.

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.

Maybe I'm like acts of Congress or your favorite Chinese restaurant - you don't really want to know what's going on behind the door. I'm a real study in contrast, I expect, looking from without. But it adds up to what you get on stage.

I'm studying Finnish, and it's one of the five most difficult languages in the world. And the more I learn, the more I realize that's definitely true.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.