Damon Lindelof quotes:

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.

Star Wars' is a galaxy a long time ago, far, far away. 'Star Wars' is not about our future.

My father - until the day that my dad died - didn't know how many points you scored in a touchdown. He could say there were nine innings in baseball, but no intricacies of the sport.

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 believe that this idea of story or myth or this thing that Joseph Campbell writes about is sort of an inter-connective spiritual force - like The Force in 'Star Wars' - where it doesn't matter where you were raised, or what your background is, there are certain elements of story that totally appeal to you.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

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

Connecting dots is not that rewarding of an experience.

I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it.

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.

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

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

The year that 'Lost' started and premiered was, without a doubt, the most miserable year of my life. The level of despair and anguish that I was feeling; I was clinically depressed, and anyone that you talked to who knew me at the time will tell you that.

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.

I would say that my fatal flaw, as a human being, is that I need people to like me, and if they don't like me, I will obsess over it - and try to change my personality until they like me - even if they don't like me for reasons that have nothing to do with me, and even if they're strangers.

Michael Arndt, that guy - you're just supposed to say nice things about other writers, but I worship Michael Arndt.

I love collaborating with different people.

The fundamental law of nature is to not know too much about yourself.

I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.

Sometimes diehard fans expect so much that they're never happy no matter what they get.

When someone says something in an interview, the beauty of Twitter is that it's a platform for instantaneous response.

There is a reason behind life. There is some connectivity between living beings. Whether you want to call that 'God' or 'The Force' or whatever word you use for it, I do believe in a spiritualized mechanism.

I love finding new creative partnerships but then continuing the partnerships I'm already in.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

All great sci-fi is: Be careful what you wish for.

I love the 'Lost' ending. I stand by it, but there are a lot of people out there who hate it.

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.

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

Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?'

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.

When someone says something that really hurts me, I have to retweet it to let it go.

I have found, unfortunately, that if I take on too many projects at one time, there is a higher probability of those projects sucking.

Essentially, there's no scientific evidence whatsoever that could ever be presented to me that would wipe out my fundamental spiritual beliefs.

Lost is a mystery show, so I think that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature.

There is no suspense in inevitability.

I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium.

I think 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy has a very satisfying ending, and there's not really that deep of a mythological construct.

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.

I've always felt that really good prequels should be original movies.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

From my own internal fanboy perspective, there's nothing that I hate more than seeing a three minute trailer for a movie where I feel like it's shown me the entire movie.

I'll never be immune to criticism, and that's okay, and I'm very comfortable with that.

I saw myself as a teacher's pet but with a little of Ed Haskell mixed in. I was the teacher's pet, but that didn't mean that I was trying to pull one over.

I always remember liking school.

I've always believed that a good twist is one that, when it is presented to the audience, half of them say, 'I saw that coming.' And half of them are completely and totally shocked. Because if you don't have the half that saw it coming, then it wasn't fair: You never gave the audience a chance to guess it.

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

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

I don't think anybody wants to see a dour 'Star Trek' movie.

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

Just put your best foot forward and hope for the best. You also have to acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes.

Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough'.

Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing is that when you're feeling very scared about something and convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that's exactly the idea that you should do.

I was born in 1973, so I did not see 'Alien' when it was released theatrically. I saw 'Alien' when it was on Home Box Office. I think I was probably 10.

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.

I feel like great TED Talks are ones that are a little bit subject to interpretation, that do provoke further conversation - and potentially controversy.

If your friend is critical [of your work], you have to have a very thick skin and a thick skin is something that only builds up after it's callused for awhile.

If you're the guy who basically shows up with coal at the locomotive, they will put it in the train. Like, they won't even assess whatever or not it's good coal.Just throw it in there.

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.

My gravestone will say,'Here Lies Damon Lindelof - Or Does He?

We all look at ourselves in the mirror and think, 'Am I good?

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

Hire people you get along with, and then let them do what they do best.

Look, we can definitively agree that cable is far superior to network. That isn't to say that there can't be a great network drama or comedy that makes 20-plus episodes a year. We know that there are, and there have been.

I place a higher value on work ethic than talent, because, in certain areas, you just need to cast, you need to cast actors with talent, you need to hire directors with talent, but I've worked with very talented people who have a poor work ethic, and the outcome is less desirable than people who are less talented and have an incredible work ethic.

When you're a writer and you're a producer, traditionally the junkets are really focused on the beautiful people and nobody wants to talk to you.

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."

I don't think it's hubris for me to say I'm a Trek fan. So, I don't treat Trek fans as somebody who's separate than I am. The only thing that separates them is, I'm one of the people responsible for the story in this movie and they're not. But we're all Trek fans. I can hang.

I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I've seen all the shows, I've seen all the movies, but ultimately I just want a 2-hour movie that takes me to another time and place - something that entertains me.

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.

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

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.

It's television. The reality of it is, if you go on the boards and people are saying, "I saw that coming," or "This is lame," or "I can't believe they're doing this again..." Having been one of those people myself, I know better, and try to avoid it.

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

Reputation is a very interesting thing, and I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I think that there's a part of all of us, especially in a generation where a lot of the stuff gets recorded.

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.

I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.

If you're constantly hamstrung by worry that people aren't going to like it, you can't do your job.