George Eliot Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we're presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated - not nearly as black and white as we're led to believe.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

Simple black-and-white thinking or action is always going to be problematic.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

The world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

Anybody who believes and experiences their life and doesn't have shades of gray in it doesn't live where I live and is simply not in touch with the reality of the human condition.

I always try to find something I like about the bad guys and then try to find the mistakes and the flaws in the good guys.

There are very few really stark black and white stories.

Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys.

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.

Even if I'm playing a bad guy, I work hard to make him multi-leveled and interesting.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.