Jonathan Nolan Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Moving, Eye, Axes

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

  47 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Movie, Money, Dark

  "The Dark Knight". www.imdb.com. 2008.

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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

  Nice, Lying, Believe

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Understanding, Instruments, Humans

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Optimistic, Long, Waiting

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Drama, Book

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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.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Simple, Clouds, People

  "Memento Mori". Book by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. 2000.

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Important, May, Privacy

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Men, Idiot, Gang

  "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Real, World, Violence

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Tvs, Marathon, Discovering

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Over You, Trying, Matter

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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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

  Distance, Looks, Virtue

  "Memento Mori". www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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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

  Mind, Trying, Use

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Matter, Way, Projects

  Source: collider.com

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Men, Tragedy, Genius

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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

  Thinking, Important, Needs

  Source: collider.com

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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

  New York, Character, Ideas

  Source: collider.com

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

  Jonathan Nolan

  Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Talking, People, Littles

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Character, Years, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Expectations, Mankind, Greater

  Source: collider.com

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• 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.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Character, Different, Television

  Source: collider.com

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• 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.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Play, Ideas, Long

  Source: collider.com

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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

  Thinking, People, Taste

  "Comic-Con 2011: Jonathan Nolan, Jim Caviezel, Michael Emerson, and Taraji P. Henson Talk PERSON OF INTEREST & the Creepiness of Modern Surveillance". Interview with Jason Barr, collider.com. July 26, 2011.

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