Jonathan Nolan Quotes
We are the only instrument for understanding the universe. We have to ground it in human beings.
Quotes to Explore
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Darling, when you're as old as I am, you cherish the very few musicals that have come your way that you know are great classics. You become their guardian.
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You can't try to be somebody you're not; that's not style. If someone says, 'Buy this - you'll be stylish,' you won't be stylish because you won't be you. You have to learn who you are first, and that's painful.
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I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I've been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found 'Restrepo' to be unbelievably useful.
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We live in a time where government is not a leadership thing, it's more a business that's out there and running riot, so I guess the people have to go out there and say stuff.
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Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others' children.
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I thought martial arts was going to help me with my movies and TV stuff, but I realized it would not.
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We filmed 'Expelled' in Santa Clarita at an all-girl's school. There were twelve hour days.
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
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I'm not that interested in people.
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My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
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I am very shy with people I don't know.
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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
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Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
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Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal - in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes.
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Being a wife-mother and doing a job, it's the toughest damn thing in the world. But we want it.
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The hardest battle you’re ever going to fight is the battle to be just you.
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The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man's dominion - this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created.
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Immigration policy is a complicated issue. Or perhaps one should say immigration policies are complicated, since we have many different immigration laws and practices which interact in complex ways.
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One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.
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I would say that, apart from being a writer, I have also always been very conscious of the idea of a 'world elsewhere'.
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An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
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Being an actor really, really strengthens me as a director. There's just a certain type of understanding that comes from having been there and knowing how much is really being asked of actors that helps me.
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Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.
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We are the only instrument for understanding the universe. We have to ground it in human beings.
