Joshua Ferris Quotes

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

I am not one to seek simple causes.

I think the job of movie reviewing can be really tough. If a film has layers that need to be thought about, it's easy to get missed the first time around.

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

Positive characterizations are complex characterizations. That's all we need to know. They shouldn't be saccharine. They shouldn't feel like medicine.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

There's more depth to Lionel. What I am finding so interesting about playing him is there's all these different layers. I prefer playing Lionel because he's a human being.

I like things that aren't superficially one thing or another.

History is complex.

Multifaceted and textured characters are always more intriguing to me. You never really just want to play one note. It becomes a bit monotone and boring.

I'm not a person you can figure out in one month. And you can't listen to one song and say, 'That's who he is.'

People often only see one side to someone's personality, but there are levels.

I didn't like characters that were one- or two-dimensional. I liked a guy to have a lot of different levels to him and layers, and I think I pretty well succeeded with Thanos.

I don't like to just be simple. Even though some of my stuff can seem simple at times, I like to write in a way that, when you listen to it over and over again, you hear something new, and it requires you to think.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

It's always interesting exploring something that has dimensions and layers to it.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

I think the most interesting characters are those in which you can see both sides.

There are a lot of layers to me.