Damon Lindelof Quotes

I've always been fascinated by Disneyland and Disney World, and my favorite part of the park was always Tomorrowland.

One person's magical thinking is another person's cynicism.

As cliched as it sounds, if you have an original voice and an original idea, then no matter what anybody says, you have to find a way to tell that story.

I can't live my life under the sort of "I cannot fail" philosophy, because then every time I do fail, which feels more inevitable than me being perfect all the time, it's going to be soul crushing. And more importantly, I'll never take any risks.

I stand by the Lost finale. It's the story that we wanted to tell, and we told it. No excuses. No apologies. I look back on it as fondly as I look back on the process of writing the whole show. And while I'll always care what you think, I can't be a slave to it anymore. Here's why: I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.

I'm not glass-half-full, glass-half-empty; I'm like, "There's a glass?"

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

For us, there's an inherent process when you're ending something to be thinking about the beginning, as writers.

Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world.

The interpretive element of "Lost," the fact that you immediately need as soon as the episode is over to seek out a community of people to express your own thoughts about it, understand what they thought about it and form an opinion, that's the bread and butter of the show.

There is no suspense in inevitability.

Part of the fun of the movie is understanding exactly why we called it Prometheus. And also, it sounds really pretentious, like Inception, so we were just like, "Yeah, that makes the movie sound really smart!" It's so much better then my original title, Explosion. Well, there might be an explosion in the movie.

If you do something awesome, you should be proud of yourself.

Anger is not a real feeling. Every time in my life I've ever been angry, it's because I was scared, or because I was sad and I didn't know it. Anger doesn't just come out of a vacuum.

People talk about overnight successes, and ultimately, there's a certain amount of, you want to call it luck or fortune or good fortune, or whatever, but when your moment arrives, you have to have been at a point where you paid your dues, or done your 10,000 hours or have the requisite talent or whatever.

Suffice it to say, there are some very big ideas in Prometheus and, therefore, it covers a very vast expanse of time.

I've always been into having stories told to me. I was a voracious reader, my father was also a teller of tales; and the kind of Baron Munchausen proxy of a tall tale was much more interesting than a true tale.

Ultimately, I just felt like Twitter brought out the worst in me. It made me super defensive when I was attacked, because you're under a constant state of attack. No one should be able to check their @ mentions, because Twitter is the equivalent of "Hey, those three people over there that are whispering... They're whispering about you! Do you want to know what they're saying?"

As a storyteller, you also don't want to make people feel like they're left out, like other people who have read the book have an interior knowledge of this show, and the degree of difficulty in watching it is much higher.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

I look at myself more as a storyteller than a screenwriter, as pretentious as that may sound, but that's what really attracts me to TED Talks. For me, the really effective ones are being presented by expert storytellers.

When I saw 'Blade Runner,' my understanding was that 'Blade Runner' and 'Alien' were sequels to each other - or they were related. They were set in the same world.

I promised myself I would never be one of those people who complained about "Oh man, lots of people are interested in our movie and now I gotta talk about it."

Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.

I remember what it was like to be doing 'Lost' and how creatively immersive it was. I just couldn't really engage on anything else, other than 'Lost;' I was just thinking about it all the time, and then there was just the pure workload, the 70- or 80-hour weeks.