102 Quotes by Jonathan Nolan

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.

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.

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”.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.