Scott: "The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic."

Scott: "You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'"

Scott: "Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?"

Scott: "In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture."

Scott: "How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?"

Scott: "It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there."

Scott: "I think if I'm going to do a science fiction, I'm going to go down a new path that I want to do."

Scott: "Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying."

Scott: "The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it."

Scott: "In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion."

Scott: "A hit for me is if I enjoy the movie, if I personally enjoy the movie."

Scott: "I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film."

Scott: "I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain."