Frank Herbert Quotes

There are always loose ends in real life.

I think imperfections are important, just as mistakes are important. You only get to be good by making mistakes, and you only get to be real by being imperfect.

Anything and everything at any given time is sort of the point I think. We're dealing in real situations and that's why we have our handlers there, to hopefully protect us from the bad, but yes; each show I think that sort of thing is going to go down because it's obviously not a perfect system and it's not a perfect world.

The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

I'm at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

I don't know anyone who's 100 percent pure - nor do I have any interest in portraying anyone like that.

The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg.

If you look at 'The Have and the Have Nots,' I didn't want to write a show where everyone is great and wonderful and perfect. I wanted to write it so that you're not really sure who the haves are. You look at Hanna, and you see that she doesn't have much, but she has great faith.

Life's messy.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.

The reason my games are chaotic is that the world is chaotic, not me. I don't aim for bad endings - they just naturally come out.

Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.

The real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one... Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control - the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others - but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself... It's like trying to control a dream.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

Our real discoveries come from chaos.

I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course; chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future.

People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.

My life is not balanced and not everything is perfect all the time.

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.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.