“'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next.”

“I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth.”

“I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.”

“I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.”

“I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.”

“I love crime procedurals. I always have. I love cop shows.”

“I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid.”

“I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner.”

“I'm a big, big, big techno dork.”

“I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.”

“I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.”

“I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.”

“I'm not a big fan of visual effects.”

“In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.”

“It's always gratifying to hear that people are excited by something that you've been excited to make.”

“I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.”

“Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.”

“My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.”

“People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.”

“To me, Joss Whedon is a god. I'm just a huge fan of his work; I love his work on TV.”

“We have been crafted by disaster to push out to the utmost horizon to find out what's on the other side of it. That's in our nature. What's also in our nature is a profound love and connection to our children and our communities. Those two things are very much at conflict with one another at certain moments.”

“When you have a smartphone, the things that it can do are kind of ridiculous and terrifying.”

“When you're doing a film called 'Interstellar,' at some point - the idea was to be grounded in the science as much as possible - but with a name like 'Interstellar,' you had better go somewhere big and bold.”

“With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.”

“Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.”

“Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond our own. Something would have to make one.”