Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Nolan

I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.

I love crime procedurals. I always have. I love cop shows.

I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.

I'm a big, big, big techno dork.

I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.

When you're doing a film called 'Interstellar,' at some point - the idea was to be grounded in the science as much as possible - but with a name like 'Interstellar,' you had better go somewhere big and bold.

People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.

I'm not affiliated with either Wikileaks or Anonymous - of course, it's not like I would tell you anyway if I were because the whole point is to be anonymous.

One of the things I love about working with my brother is that there's a commitment there - an unwavering commitment. From our basement in Illinois when I was three years old to Iceland on a frozen glacier with Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon in spacesuits - there's a commitment to the pure spectacle, the pure cinema of it.

Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond our own. Something would have to make one.

I often want to go to the movies and see something that transports you beyond the infinite.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next.

With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.

To me, Joss Whedon is a god. I'm just a huge fan of his work; I love his work on TV.

I'm not a big fan of visual effects.

I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.

I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.

We have been crafted by disaster to push out to the utmost horizon to find out what's on the other side of it. That's in our nature. What's also in our nature is a profound love and connection to our children and our communities. Those two things are very much at conflict with one another at certain moments.

It's always gratifying to hear that people are excited by something that you've been excited to make.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth.

My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.

In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.

I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid.

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.

When you have a smartphone, the things that it can do are kind of ridiculous and terrifying.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.

I don't like to talk about messages so much with films simply because it's a little more didactic. The reason I'm a filmmaker is to tell stories and so you hope that they will have resonance for people and for the kind of things you're talking about.

We live in a moment in history in which our privacy may not be important.

I was struck by - Einstein's a fascinating figure who didn't have any instruments that he used, he didn't use telescopes, he used his mind to try to understand the universe.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

Mankind's expectations have to be greater than ourselves and that the further out there we go, the more we find out that it's about you and me.

None of us like violence in the real world, but we're fascinated with it onscreen.

We're going to leave this planet at some point further than we have, we're going to go beyond the moon, we're going to go to mars. We all kind of know that on some level, I think actually. So there's an inevitability to human evolution, this being the next step.

Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

Even if you're not a parent, you have parents and you've been in those situations where there's a certain kind of goodbye - nothing this extreme exists, but I think that's what everyone holds onto, that common denominator that runs through this that everyone can understand.

If you're good at something, never do it for free.

Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.

You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.

I don't think anyone really understands why a show works or why it doesn't.

Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.

Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.

Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

I always love it best when you have a project where there is this commingling of the subject matter and the way in which you're recording that subject matter.

TV is, as I'm discovering now, a marathon. You have to keep going and going and going.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.

Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list.

It can be easy for an actor to go "Well I really have to do a lot" and then just saying "I don't need to do anything, I'm not bound to do anything".

Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

One of my first experiences with the space program was with the memorial that was built for the Challenger. When I was in 7th grade my entire class spent the entire school year preparing to launch a spaceship all together. We all had our different jobs that we had to learn how to do, we learned the math that you needed, we learned the practical skills that you needed, and I thought that was really cool. So I think that if you can take a tragedy and find the gold in it and turn it into something positive, that's great.

One of the things with our show is posing a lot of questions, but getting a lot of answers too.

For a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. This is the tragedy of life.

For me, the attraction of TV is that you continue to get to tell those stories and refine those characters. The other thing is that TV, in the last years, got really, really, really good.

I remember when I was a kid my first real confrontation with space travel was when the Challenger exploded and I remember how traumatic that was for me, because I remember watching that on the news and all the children in our class were watching.

We are the only instrument for understanding the universe. We have to ground it in human beings.

I think that we, as human beings, always need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasp and I think it's very important that we don't become complacent or stagnant.