Iris Chang Quotes

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

I like cutting through complexity and trying to get to the kernel of an idea.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

When in doubt, delete it.

Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

My reaction to everything in life is when it gets a bit complicated to water it down and make it simple again.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

People tend to simplify things.

Business isn't complicated; we complicate business.

Looking through the camera lens reduces noise; as humans we see a million shapes, colours and textures. What the lens does, what art does in general, is get rid of all the noise. It hones in and isolates the qualities of a scene.

I do better in life when my world seems a little smaller.

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory. Enter the world of elimination.

Eliminate the superfluous.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

It takes a long time to make it simple.

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.