David Levithan Quotes

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.

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.

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

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

I like characters who are contradictory.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

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

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

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.

We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

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?

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

For nothing was simply one thing.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

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

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.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.