Nolan: "I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am."

Nolan: "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."

Nolan: "Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing."

Nolan: "But in the back of my mind I've always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie, if it's done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me, if I have the opportunity to do it."

Nolan: "I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I've felt it."

Nolan: "Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you."

Nolan: "One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself."

Nolan: "I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing."

Nolan: "In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing."

Nolan: "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."

Nolan: "The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture."

Nolan: "My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really."

Nolan: "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."

Nolan: "Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea."

Nolan: "I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology."

Nolan: "The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography."

Nolan: "I've always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies."

Nolan: "We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale."

Nolan: "When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world."