Stephen Gaghan Quotes

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions.

There is no simple answer to what I think.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It's taken me a long time to realize that.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

I wouldn't say Jamie is an evil genius. I'm not sure he's evil and I'm not sure he's a genius.

In one sentence, I'd describe myself as indescribable. But, I wouldn't end it with a period. I'd end it with three dots.

It felt to me like America was always wanting to resolve things too quickly, without thinking through what the costs and consequences would be and how that affects an individual living in that world. Then as I grew up and went about my life, I think I just got more and more interested in that gray area where things are not so easily quantified.

Nobody is all good or all bad.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

My movies are not movies of answers but of questions.

I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.

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 left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

You just look at the world, and you see things unraveling, and you say, 'I wonder what we ought to do?' Things are seldom crystal clear.

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't always tie up neatly at the end of the episode.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

There aren't always a hell of a lot of absolutely right answers out there.

It's a disease we have that we think that everything is explainable. It's a merchandising idea because you can sell explanations and cures for everything, but it doesn't work like that. It's very hard to understand everything.

Every great story leaves you questioning. If all of the questions are answered, and everything is resolved, it's boring. There's nothing to talk about afterwards.