Nicolas Cage 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.

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

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

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

It is hard to decide whether Mark Zuckerberg is the most interesting boring person in the world or the most boring interesting one.

That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.

I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

I like playing characters that are complex, that are intriguing, that come from left field, that do things that are unexpected. I don't like people who just follow one line and that's it - that's why I could never be in a sitcom, I don't think. They're not intriguing enough for me.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I like characters who are contradictory.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

Television is what it's always been. The best of times and the worst of times at the same time.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

There's always been a confusion about my sensibility. 'Is he kind of edgy, or is he Carol Burnett?' I'm a little bit of a hybrid. I like to please, but I like dark stuff, too.

The Cube is, at the same time, a symbol of simplicity and complexity.

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.

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

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

Power is paradoxical.

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?'

There's a dark side to everything.

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.