Graham Moore Quotes

Sometimes I hate it so much," she said. "Always having to pretend." Paul gripped her fingers tighter. "This is America," he said. "We're all pretending.

I think everyone practices their Oscars acceptance speech with a shampoo bottle, and I've done my fair share of them. It's really surreal to be able to do it in real life.

Inept lying was almost as good as honesty.

would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn

Arthur thought about this, and decided quite rationally that lying was by far the best approach to take.

In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Homes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day's papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius.

Some writing one had to do in the dark.

Everyone remembers the pop-quiz hotshot bit from 'Speed' because it's extremely funny, and it's really smart and really witty. And the notion that action movies can have dialogue that pops just as well as the explosions is something that I hope more people continue to remember.

'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him.

We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top.

The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you're ever given a thing.

Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn't mean he'll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.

I love the filmmaking process. It can be loud sometimes, and people love having conference calls, so working on a book is the polar opposite. It's very relaxing.

I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.

Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.

Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they're social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That's the goal.

Women now seek to involve themselves in the life of their government because their government has involved itself in their lives!

Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.

Gray fall light came through the nine square glass panes. On days like this, the strips of white wood that separated the glass seemed brighter to the eye than did the window light.

It is the people no one imagines anything from who do the things no one can imagine

Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that's impossible to break is the solution at the end.

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.

I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.

Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing - extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas.

There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery

If the day hadn't yet convinced him of the merits of women's suffrage, it had certainly convinced him of the justness of the movement for Rational Dress.

I liked Columbia, but it was like high school in that there was this big social world that I was not part of. I existed on the side, far away. That might be temperamental, my own fear of large groups, more than anything else. But I had a handful of professors who meant a lot to me.

A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse.

Realism, I think, is fleeting. It's the romance that will live forever.

Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.

One of the tricky things about sort of larger, comic-book action movies is that the scale is so big that they have to save the world at the end of every movie, and so at the end of each of the films, either Chicago or New York end up getting obliterated.

My mother, she worked in the mayor's office in Chicago when I was growing up and has been in democratic politics for a long time.

He would have achieved victory and rebellion at the same time.

Love grew commendably dependable - love was eggs, love was ham, love was the morning paper.

Being bad at stuff is hard, and we all deal with it every day because we're all bad at stuff.

I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.

Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating the particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances?

Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don't feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they're said to be blossoming.

When I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of a guy who can wander into the confusion of life and sort of pluck out answers at will.

[In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended. - THOMAS EDISON R

Where the first America was brilliant, the second was ingenious. What

His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention.

When I first starting writing, and no one was paying me, in order to feel like I had a real job, I would get out of bed, put on a jacket and tie every morning, and sit down at my desk.

Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.

The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the "investigation" phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like "vile treachery" in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world's largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well.

[On writing more Sherlock Holmes stories.] 'I don't care whether you do or not,' said Bram. 'But you will, eventually. He's yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote "The Final Problem"? I don't think you did. I think you always knew he'd be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don't bring him here. Don't bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won't stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody *friends.* No, what they'll remember are the stories. They'll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.

Arthur looked deeply into the boy's clear blue eyes and scanned the contours of his handsome face. Arthur could hear something, faintly, in the distance. A rushing sound. A crash of water against rock. He wasn't sure if it was real or not, but he heard it all the same. Torrents of water rushing over a cliff. He tuned his ears to the noise and recognized the tone. He steadied his hand and listened to the sound, from the back of his mind, of the Reichenbach Falls.

The immolation occurred late on a Friday morning. The lunchtime bustle was picking up as Paul descended from his office building onto the crowded street. He cut an imposing figure against the flow of pedestrians: six feet four inches, broad shouldered, clean-shaven, clothed in the matching black coat, vest, and long tie that was to be expected of New York's young professional men. His hair, perfectly parted on the left, had just begun to recede into a gentle widow's peak. He looked older than his twenty-six years. As

In my experience, depression was not something that has been cured so much as managed, like a lot of illnesses.

I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.

Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.

Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren't brothers. Plot points didn't leave behind grieving sisters who couldn't find their shoes.

Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider.

I feel very Midwestern at my core.

I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

Arthur narrowly avoided tripping over his own skirt as he hurried out of the ladies' powder room in full pursuit.

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.

I have writer friends who go to the premiere of a film with their name listed as the writer, but they are shocked: 'That's not what I wrote!'

It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.

Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.

When I was 16 years old I tried to kill myself because I felt different and that I didn't belong. Now I'm here, and I want this moment to be for that kid who feels weird or different. Stay weird, stay different.

A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place - that was loneliness.

Poor people all think they deserve to be rich," he continued. "Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.

I was not a successful TV comedy writer.

Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.

Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

Depression is something I've dealt with every day of my life.

Everyone has strange teenage years. It's not like I can claim some particularly unique set of high school horrors. I think I was just an awkward kid who never felt comfortable in his own skin. I think I was alone a lot by circumstance and then by choice.

The only way for something human to feel human is to convince others that it is.

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.

I did an adaptation for a movie called 'The Devil in the White City' by Erik Larson for Warner Brothers. I love that book.