Yorgos Lanthimos Quotes

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?'

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

I think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn't have room for any of that.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

I'm a walking contradiction. I am funny that way.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

I like to ride the line between absurd and sincere.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

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.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

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

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.

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

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 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.'

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.

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