Top 30 Alex Garland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it’s my head I’m locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.”

— Alex Garland

2. “If I’d learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

— Alex Garland

3. “Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed.”

— Alex Garland

4. “Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.”

— Alex Garland

5. “Impulse. Response. Fluid. Imperfect. Patterned. Chaotic.”

— Alex Garland

6. “Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.”

— Alex Garland

7. “The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.”

— Alex Garland

8. “Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion of someone. I make quick judgments, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly.”

— Alex Garland

9. “I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it’s partly from an atheist perspective because I’m an atheist, and I’m just not really interested in religious-based questions.”

— Alex Garland

10. “I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I’d felt instantly at home.”

— Alex Garland

11. “I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a LOT of scars.”

— Alex Garland

12. “If you look at the whole life of the planet, we – you know, Man – has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality.”

— Alex Garland

13. “Well, if there’s an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen – no matter how small the likelihood.”

— Alex Garland

14. “I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down.”

— Alex Garland

15. “Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life. You dream, you wake: you live, you die.”

— Alex Garland

16. “Maybe to have a memory you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.”

— Alex Garland

17. “By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed.”

— Alex Garland

18. “Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren’t up to the job.”

— Alex Garland

19. “I don’t like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn’t haggle with poverty and getting ripped off.”

— Alex Garland

20. “When I see ‘Sunshine,’ I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it’s a really complicated film for me. And I’ve never been really able to resolve all that in myself.”

— Alex Garland

21. “You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone’s so friendly. It’s such simple stuff, but... If i could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, i think I’d restart it like this. For everyone.”

— Alex Garland

22. “There’s this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn’t exist... If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.”

— Alex Garland

23. “It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I’m not planning to write a script; I’m planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.”

— Alex Garland

24. “Ava’s living area is made up of three primary spaces.”

— Alex Garland

25. “I’ve never been to Comic-Con, but I’m certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it’s a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.”

— Alex Garland

26. “He spoke in english. Not flawlessly by any means. Not like a Nazi POW camp commandant who appreciates english poetry and says things like ‘you know, we are much alike, you and I I’. But good enough.”

— Alex Garland

27. “Moshe was a tall Israeli with an ear-splitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness. Hearing the laugh made me blink instinctively, like hearing a hammer pound on brick or metal. Our conversation was impeded by having to watch him through the strobe effect of my convulsing eyes.”

— Alex Garland

28. “I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn’t give up. Stubborn, maybe.”

— Alex Garland

29. “Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.”

— Alex Garland

30. “You learn about me, and I learn nothing about you. That’s not a foundation on which friendships are based.”

— Alex Garland

31. “I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.”

— Alex Garland

32. “Jed! I got stuck in some air pocket with more exits than... ” I couldn’t think of anything famous with a large number of exits “I nearly drowned!”

— Alex Garland

33. “I’ve written original material before, where I’ve come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that’s definitely very different to working with someone else’s characters and stories.”

— Alex Garland

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

34. “You wake, you die.”

— Alex Garland