William Manchester Quotes

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

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

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.

I like characters who are contradictory.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

Truth is always paradoxical.

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

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

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

My father was a very contradictory man.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

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

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

I always look for contradiction in a character.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

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

My problem is not that I see all 17 sides of any issue, but I'm equally passionate about all 17 sides simultaneously.

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.'

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.