102 Quotes by Jonathan Nolan

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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