Gary Wolf Quotes

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.

People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

People never know what they want, though everyone says they do. If they did, nobody would ever be surprised.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.

I'm full of contradictions.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.