Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Nolan Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 80 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jonathan Nolan.

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Famous Quotes By Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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I'm a big, big, big techno dork. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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I thought it would be an enormous amount of fun to make a movie that heads out into space, which is something that we had never done before. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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Not too many professions out there that value forgetfulness. Prostitution, maybe. Politics, of course. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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'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. — Jonathan Nolan

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You will be late for your own funeral. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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

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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? — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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Why bother reading something that you won't remember? — Jonathan Nolan

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I love crime procedurals. I always have. I love cop shows. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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I'm not a big fan of visual effects. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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

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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". — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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If time and fear aren't enough to dissuade people from their revenge, then there's always authority, softly shaking its head and saying, 'We understand, but you're the better man for letting it go. For rising above it. For not sinking to their level. And besides,' says authority, 'if you try anything stupid, we'll lock you up in a little room.' — Jonathan Nolan

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

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

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Lists are the only way out of this mess. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth. — Jonathan Nolan

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How can you forgive if you can't remember to forget? — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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Books are a time machine. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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

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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. — Jonathan Nolan

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

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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. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots. — Jonathan Nolan