Top 80 Christopher Nolan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy, there is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great powerful myth to the character and romantic element that draws from a lot of literary sources.”

— Christopher Nolan

52. “There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren’t correct.”

— Christopher Nolan

53. “I think for me when you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it almost as a playground for action and adventure and so forth, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds, whether it’s the Bond films and things like that.”

— Christopher Nolan

54. “Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.”

— Christopher Nolan

55. “I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.”

— Christopher Nolan

56. “You never quite know what you’re going to come back to and figure out how to make it work. You never quite know where that desire to finish something, or return to something in a fresh way, is going to come from. Every time I finished a film and went back and looked at it, I had changed as a person.”

— Christopher Nolan

57. “If I could steal someone’s dream myself, I’d have to go for one of Orson Welles.”

— Christopher Nolan

58. “I’ve never read Joseph Campbell, and I don’t know all that much about story archetypes.”

— Christopher Nolan

59. “Batman and Superman are very different characters but they’re both iconic and elemental. Finding the right story for them both is the key.”

— Christopher Nolan

60. “When I look at a digitally acquired and projected image, it looks inferior against an original negative anamorphic print or an IMAX one.”

— Christopher Nolan

61. “The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.”

— Christopher Nolan

62. “I’ve always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies.”

— Christopher Nolan

63. “I want to be surprised and entertained by a movie, so that’s what we’re trying to do for the audience. Obviously, we also have to sell the film.”

— Christopher Nolan

64. “The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it’s density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density.”

— Christopher Nolan

65. “The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It’s a pipeline that needs to be fed.”

— Christopher Nolan

66. “I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway.”

— Christopher Nolan

67. “It’s always a fun collaboration with my brother. I’m very fortunate to be able to work with him. There’s an honesty to collaboration. There’s a lack of a gender or ego in our conversations. And so you can really throw anything around.”

— Christopher Nolan

68. “Heist movies tend to be a bit superficial, glamorous, and fun. They don’t tend to be emotionally engaging.”

— Christopher Nolan

69. “The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it’s chronological or non-chronological. To me that’s always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?”

— Christopher Nolan

70. “I’m taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.”

— Christopher Nolan

71. “It’s certainly difficult to balance marketing a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience.”

— Christopher Nolan

72. “I would never say someone else’s film isn’t ‘a real film.’ The quote is inaccurate.”

— Christopher Nolan

73. “The quality of racing continues to excel with starters increasing to 1496,.”

— Christopher Nolan

74. “But, in each case, as a filmmaker who’s been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.”

— Christopher Nolan

75. “I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.”

— Christopher Nolan

76. “I think for me, what I’m doing on set is I’m watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what’s the image we’re photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be.”

— Christopher Nolan

77. “As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.”

— Christopher Nolan

78. “It’s not that often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something that you want to do that you can excite people about.”

— Christopher Nolan

79. “Albert Einstein: So here we are, hmm? Lost in your quantum world of probabilities, and needing certainty.”

— Christopher Nolan

80. “Restfully reassured by his new friends, Joseph now nominated God in a new light, ‘Man is God hesitant and God is Man hesitantly trying to help.”

— Christopher Nolan

81. “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.”

— Christopher Nolan

82. “Don’t talk like you’re one of them! You’re not... even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak, like me. They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their “code”... it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these uh, these “civilized people”, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”

— Christopher Nolan

83. “The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you.”

— Christopher Nolan

84. “ARTHUR: The only way to wake up from inside the dream is to die.”

— Christopher Nolan

85. “Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He’s not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he’s a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.”

— Christopher Nolan