Betty Smith Quotes

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

The most interesting thing about being alive is that there is no black and white; there are many shades of gray.

The gray area, the place between black and white - that's the place where life happens.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

I'm part of the mushball middle. I consider 'confused' the majority position because, thankfully, most people would rather be uncertain some of the time than 100% positive all the time - even when they're wrong.

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

Most consequential choices involve shades of gray, and some fog is often useful in getting things done.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

Nothing is ever cut-and-dried. There's anguish behind everything.

I think the biggest mistake I made was this wretched ability to see both sides of an argument.

There is no simple answer to what I think.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.

I don't know what would I do in future; I'll decide it later.

Most of the decisions you make are not black and white, but at the end of the day, you have to make the decision.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

There are gray areas in everything.

It's really rare in life that a situation is as black and white as we tend to paint it.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence.

I believe it would be considerably healthier for us to dare to live without a reason for many things than with reasons that are simplistic.

Things aren't black and white in the world.

Nothing is all good or all bad, nothing is black or white, everything is just messy and human and difficult.

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.