Alice Munro Quotes

In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.

History is complex.

I'm not a person you can figure out in one month. And you can't listen to one song and say, 'That's who he is.'

Making a film confusing does not make it intelligent.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

I am not one to seek simple causes.

I think the job of movie reviewing can be really tough. If a film has layers that need to be thought about, it's easy to get missed the first time around.

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

We have deep depth.

Positive characterizations are complex characterizations. That's all we need to know. They shouldn't be saccharine. They shouldn't feel like medicine.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

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.

There's more depth to Lionel. What I am finding so interesting about playing him is there's all these different layers. I prefer playing Lionel because he's a human being.

The complexity of the world is so overwhelming and so present to everyone.

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

It's good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.

Multifaceted and textured characters are always more intriguing to me. You never really just want to play one note. It becomes a bit monotone and boring.

People often only see one side to someone's personality, but there are levels.

I didn't like characters that were one- or two-dimensional. I liked a guy to have a lot of different levels to him and layers, and I think I pretty well succeeded with Thanos.