Making it simple, keeping it complex

Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

—Ward Cunningham

The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.

—Sol LeWitt

When I begin, I usually improvise a melody and sing words—and often those words are just clichés. If it is an old songwriting cliché, most of the time I throw it away, but sometimes I keep it, because they’re nice to have. They’re familiar. They’re like a breather for the listener. You can stop wondering or thinking for a little while and just float along with the music.

—Paul Simon

The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

—Fernando J. Corbató

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

—Alan Perlis

The nail doesn’t have to look like a house; it is not a house. It is a nail. If the house is going to stand, the nail must do the work of a nail. To do the work of a nail, it has to look like a nail.

—David Mamet

Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.

—Kevin Kelly

While it might seem that richness suggests excess and maximal inclusion, we actually need to be selective about the elements we include, or the novel will not be rich so much as an incomprehensible blur, a smear of language. Think about the very real limitations of Pynchon as a novelist: many complain about his flat characters and slapstick humor, but without those elements to manage the text and simplify it, his already dangerously complex fiction would become unreadable.

—Mike Meginnis

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and complex. The better way is to go deeper with simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

—Jonathan Ive

A great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.

—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity. But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

—Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.