Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

We're so quick to go to make things black and white, and to put things in their box. But everything is this mixture - and that's what this world is - is this blend of different things.

In one sentence, I'd describe myself as indescribable. But, I wouldn't end it with a period. I'd end it with three dots.

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity, there is no truth.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

There is no law governing all things.

I'm not such a big fan of having a linear answer to things.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

In tragedy, it's hard to find a good resolution; it's not black and white: it's a big fog of gray.

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

… a world without certainty can be richer, in all senses of the word, than a world with false convictions.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

All of us, we are not one thing: we're always between two worlds, and the idea of not being sure is very appealing to me.

Democracy requires a certain relish for confusion

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.