Damon Lindelof Quotes

If you're constantly hamstrung by worry that people aren't going to like it, you can't do your job.

Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?'

There is a reason behind life. There is some connectivity between living beings. Whether you want to call that 'God' or 'The Force' or whatever word you use for it, I do believe in a spiritualized mechanism.

When someone says something that really hurts me, I have to retweet it to let it go.

Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world,

I love collaborating with different people.

The fundamental law of nature is to not know too much about yourself.

I've always been fascinated by Disneyland and Disney World, and my favorite part of the park was always Tomorrowland.

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

The interpretive element of 'Lost' - the fact that you immediately need, as soon as the episode is over, to seek out a community of people to express your own thoughts about it, understand what they thought about it and form an opinion - that's the bread and butter of the show.

I love finding new creative partnerships but then continuing the partnerships I'm already in.

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

I've always believed that a good twist is one that, when it is presented to the audience, half of them say, 'I saw that coming.' And half of them are completely and totally shocked. Because if you don't have the half that saw it coming, then it wasn't fair: You never gave the audience a chance to guess it.

People talk about overnight successes, and ultimately, there's a certain amount of, you want to call it luck or fortune or good fortune, or whatever, but when your moment arrives, you have to have been at a point where you paid your dues, or done your 10,000 hours or have the requisite talent or whatever.

Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

Sometimes diehard fans expect so much that they're never happy no matter what they get.

I don't think it's hubris for me to say I'm a Trek fan. So, I don't treat Trek fans as somebody who's separate than I am. The only thing that separates them is, I'm one of the people responsible for the story in this movie and they're not. But we're all Trek fans. I can hang.

I have found, unfortunately, that if I take on too many projects at one time, there is a higher probability of those projects sucking.

I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.

Hire people you get along with, and then let them do what they do best.

One person's magical thinking is another person's cynicism.

If you do something awesome, you should be proud of yourself.

I believe that this idea of story or myth or this thing that Joseph Campbell writes about is sort of an inter-connective spiritual force - like The Force in 'Star Wars' - where it doesn't matter where you were raised, or what your background is, there are certain elements of story that totally appeal to you.

If you're the guy who basically shows up with coal at the locomotive, they will put it in the train. Like, they won't even assess whatever or not it's good coal.Just throw it in there.

I'll never be immune to criticism, and that's okay, and I'm very comfortable with that.

When I saw 'Blade Runner,' my understanding was that 'Blade Runner' and 'Alien' were sequels to each other - or they were related. They were set in the same world.

I've always been into having stories told to me. I was a voracious reader, my father was also a teller of tales; and the kind of Baron Munchausen proxy of a tall tale was much more interesting than a true tale.

Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough'.

I promised myself I would never be one of those people who complained about "Oh man, lots of people are interested in our movie and now I gotta talk about it."

Just put your best foot forward and hope for the best. You also have to acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes.

Part of the fun of the movie is understanding exactly why we called it Prometheus. And also, it sounds really pretentious, like Inception, so we were just like, "Yeah, that makes the movie sound really smart!" It's so much better then my original title, Explosion. Well, there might be an explosion in the movie.

I think 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy has a very satisfying ending, and there's not really that deep of a mythological construct.

My gravestone will say, 'Here Lies Damon Lindelof - Or Does He?'

There is no suspense in inevitability.

I always remember liking school.

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

As cliched as it sounds, if you have an original voice and an original idea, then no matter what anybody says, you have to find a way to tell that story.

I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it.

From my own internal fanboy perspective, there's nothing that I hate more than seeing a three minute trailer for a movie where I feel like it's shown me the entire movie.

I love the 'Lost' ending. I stand by it, but there are a lot of people out there who hate it.

Lost is a mystery show, so I think that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature.

I don't think anybody wants to see a dour 'Star Trek' movie.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

Look, we can definitively agree that cable is far superior to network. That isn't to say that there can't be a great network drama or comedy that makes 20-plus episodes a year. We know that there are, and there have been.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

Michael Arndt, that guy - you're just supposed to say nice things about other writers, but I worship Michael Arndt.

Reputation is a very interesting thing, and I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I think that there's a part of all of us, especially in a generation where a lot of the stuff gets recorded.

I've always felt that really good prequels should be original movies.

As a storyteller, you also don't want to make people feel like they're left out, like other people who have read the book have an interior knowledge of this show, and the degree of difficulty in watching it is much higher.

I was born in 1973, so I did not see 'Alien' when it was released theatrically. I saw 'Alien' when it was on Home Box Office. I think I was probably 10.

When you're a writer and you're a producer, traditionally the junkets are really focused on the beautiful people and nobody wants to talk to you.

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

For us, there's an inherent process when you're ending something to be thinking about the beginning, as writers.