Virginia Woolf Quotes

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The color of truth is gray.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

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

Beauty does not mean one thing but not something else.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

Life is not black and white when it comes to perception.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

I like characters who are contradictory.

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.

Being human is being a lot of things at the same time.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.