I think the greatest danger of the promise of space travel is that it can lead us to be cavalier about the world we live on, if we assume we can find or make more worlds. I think in our lifetimes we surely will not, probably in the lifetimes of our great-great-grand-descendants we will not.

Directing offers you the hope that your vision will reach the screen, unmolested and intact. Therefore, it's tantalizing to all writers.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.

I will never probably have the mathematical foundation to truly understand what string theorists are talking about, but it feels good, just for its own sake, to get as close to an understanding as you can.

You don't control whether your movies get made. You can't. All you can control is whether your draft is great. So, you write your great draft, as best as you can, and then move on to the next thing.

I would say that working with Ridley Scott makes the process of directing much more terrifying.

Once you've written a good script, it will get made or not get made, according to variables you cannot control, like stars getting interested, and the superstitions in Hollywood rising or falling around what is over and done with versus what's in.