Quotes About Complexity

I like being able to play women that are growing or aren't easy to love. Maybe they are really likable, but they're annoying because they're not tapping into who they're suppose to be. You're watching them, and you're like, 'Oh, why does she keep making this decision?'

The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

A 12-year-old can watch 'Spiderman.' A 12-year-old cannot watch 'Watchmen.'

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

I definitely don't generalize and put everybody in the same cup of water.

CIA officers aren't idiots. They knew they were heading into deep water - legally and morally - when they signed up for the interrogation program. That's part of the agency's ethos - doing the hard jobs that other departments prudently avoid.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

I go back and forth, but I never wanted to be the photographer of the gay and lesbian community. I will wave a rainbow flag proudly, but I am not a singular identity. I think a singular identity isn't very interesting, and I'm a little bit more multifaceted as a person than that.

For me, the banner that I want to wave in terms of giving a jump start to writers of any gender is just to make female protagonists as complex as their male counterparts.

Everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I remember playing John Wayne Gacy, serial killer, very sick, neurotic, screwed-up guy. You know what? There's a part of me there, too, and you explore that.

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.

As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand.

No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.

When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task.

I don't want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

For me, when we're all human beings, it's just interesting that we cannot understand the other person or how they think. That's one part of the human aspect that fascinates me.

Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.

We cannot generalise anything in life. We cannot say media people are like this, film people are like this, or doctors are like this.