A Quote by Leslie Cockburn

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

Quote Topics

Achieve Appear Complex Difficult Difficult Thing Documentary Documentary Film Documentary Films Films Make Most Most Difficult Thing Simple Something Thing

Quote Author

Leslie Cockburn
American - Writer
Born: September 2, 1952

It's difficult to make movies. For me it was easier, as a refugee in Switzerland, to make documentary films, because I didn't need a lot of money for it. The way I tell my story or my opinion would be very similar in both fiction and documentary forms. But I found I could speak more effectively to convey this brutal reality through documentary than I could through fiction.

Mano Khalil

I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?

Horace Silver

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.

Grady Booch

It's easy to make something with a million style-lines. Simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve, and that's how I approach design - very minimal, pare it down, perfect.

Keith Michael

Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.

Dan Millman

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

Bruce Jackson

As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

Neil Gershenfeld

I think there's something in common with the OSS 117 movies. The big difference is there's no irony in this one. It's not parody. I tried to make it very simple. It's a simple story, but to be simple, it's very complex in the way it's done.

Michel Hazanavicius

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Terry Eagleton

Something good happened to my writing when I stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn't do something more complex. Don't be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.

Carrie Newcomer

Beware of people preaching simple solutions to complex problems. If the answer was easy someone more intelligent would have thought of it a long time ago - complex problems invariably require complex and difficult solutions.

Steve Herbert

If this seems complex, the reason is because Tao is both simple and complex. It is complex when we try to understand it, and simple when we allow ourselves to experience it.

Benjamin Stanley Rosenthal

It's really complex to make something simple.

Jack Dorsey

Being sociopath is not what most people would consider to be winning. Most of us have some kind of positive goal in mind when we think of winning. A sociopath thinks in terms of successfully manipulating someone into doing something that he or she would not have done otherwise. That can be a small thing or a tremendous thing, but the point for the sociopath is to win, to make sure that this person does what they're trying to coerce him or her into doing. It can be as disgusting and as simple as making a child cry. Or it can be as complex as making your wife feel bad about herself.