James Madison Quotes

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

It is imperfection - not perfection - that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.

I would have thought it possible to choose delegates for these larger conferences who, even if they could not speak the principal languages, could at least understand them or could have friends seated beside them who could keep them informed on essential points.

People are beautiful wrecks.

Nobody's perfect, and everybody plays the heel and the baby face at times in real life.

Even great people are always slightly disappointing, which is generally what makes them interesting.

I'm always drawn to stories about characters who are somewhat isolated inside themselves by their inability to communicate in some way. That's what interested me about 'Children of a Lesser God.'

These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

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

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

When it comes to your hero, what the readers really fall in love with are his flaws. No one ever falls in love with a perfect hero.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.

We are all somewhere or the other a little grey, not black and white. We have our imperfections.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

We like flawed people.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

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

Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues.You can't separate them. They're wedded.