Jonathan Nolan Quotes

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.

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

'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.

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

You get to a certain moment where you realize all those humans who landed on the moon did so in between Chris [Nolan] being born and me being born and no one had gone back since, all these Super-8 films we grew up watching of rocket launches, you get to a certain age and you realize all the speeches about going back, they're speeches, there's no money there, we're not going back.

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'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.

I'm not a big fan of visual effects.

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.

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

Everybody else needs mirrors to remind themselves who they are. You're no different.

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

I was definitely looking for a reason to impose rules in the story during the writing process ... a set of reasons that you could graph for why it's not chaos and anarchy - for why it has to be order, and why you need architects and an architectural brain to create the world of the dream for the subject to enter.

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.

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

How can you forgive if you can't remember to forget?

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.

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

I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth.

I don't think you can guess what people will really like. You have to come at it from a more natural place and then kind of hope that your taste is shared by enough people to keep 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.

They tried to teach you to make lists in grade school, remember? Back when your day planner was the back of your hand. And if your assignments came off in the shower, well, then they didn't get done. No direction, they said. No discipline. So they tried to get you to write it all down somewhere more permanent.

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.

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.

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.

I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it.

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.

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

The secret, of course, to any list is to keep it in a place where you're bound to see it.

We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.

Of course, weakness is strong. It's the primary impulse. You'd probably prefer to sit in your little room and cry. Live in your finite collection of memories, carefully polishing each one. Half a life set behind glass and pinned to cardboard like a collection of exotic insects. You'd like to live behind that glass, wouldn't you?

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.

For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick. That's the miserable truth.

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

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

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

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.

I've always been interested in themes of memory, paranoia, and revenge.

I can't be your ghost right now. I need to exist

To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don't want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up.

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.

I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why bother reading something that you won't remember?