Carlton Cuse Quotes

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

I love intricate plotting and exciting twists, but I realize more that people enjoy a good story in a simple, focused way.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

I think there's something in common with the OSS 117 movies. The big difference is there's no irony in this one. It's not parody. I tried to make it very simple. It's a simple story, but to be simple, it's very complex in the way it's done.

If the theme is simple, you can include a hundred details that create the illusion of actuality better.

People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

I like explaining things, and I believe that you can do very high-level explanation on basic cable news provided you are willing to work hard enough to be a good storyteller.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

A lot of filmmaking is all about filtering out the bullshit.

I was raised by and have raised people who regard telling one story when two would do as a sign someone is not really trying.

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

The problem with most love stories in my opinion is that they're too simplistic.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.