Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.
Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We're desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it's complicated and a mystery.
It's a matter of reducing the work to its very simplest possible state, eliminating all of the things that lead away from the guts of the work, the thing the work is really about. Anything that's there must build towards its over-all organization and meaning.
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
For me, good films and good books are irreducible to a lesson. You can't just kind of translate them into one statement. On the contrary, the more you do that, the less wisdom in art there is.
Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.
We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.
