Jonathan Nolan Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the things that's really fun to tap in with television right now is this sort of explosion, the peak TV moment that we're in, people are exploring different modes of storytelling here. But one of the exciting things here is being able to commit upfront to a big, big, big story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When J.J. [Abrams] called Lisa [Joy] and myself, he pitched us this idea of, what if we turn the structure around and started with the hosts. For us, that gave us a way to play with everything that we're interested in, all at once. It's the ultimate playground for us because we deal with questions about artificial intelligence, which is something I've long been fascinated by, but also human intelligence, or the lack thereof, human behavior, and interactive, immersive storytelling.

Typically with HBO shows, the ninth episode often winds up being a big one and when lots of exciting stuff happens. And then the tenth one is the more placid, character-based one.

I'm a big believer in pose some questions and then answer a few of them before you move onto the next set of questions.

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.

I've worked in the movie business for many, many years, where you have lots of days and lots of money. It's really mainly about time. We always try to conceive all of our action from a place of, "What can we shoot that looks fantastic?," rather than trying to do the kinds of thing that you would be able to accomplish in a movie.

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.

You'd have a quality insurance department, where they're making sure there aren't any glitches or weird things, and that the guests have a great experience and seamless experience. You'd also have security. So, we laid out the corporate structure, and then we cherry-picked from that the people who would be brought into the most conflict and the most day-to-day relationship with each other and with the hosts.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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'm a big believer in practical and location photography.

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.

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.

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 thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming.

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

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.

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".

Books are a time machine.

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

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.

We're gonna play a little bit of a game here [Person of Interest movie]. Greg and I felt like we had responsibility when we wrapped up the pilot, to have a roadmap for where the show went. When we pitched the pilot, we knew what we wanted the last episode to be, the last image, I think we even know what the last song is.

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

You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.