Jonathan Nolan Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Books are a time machine.

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

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.

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

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".

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

I'm a big believer in practical and location photography.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.