There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

You see in moments of duress not only the darkest parts of human nature but also the brightest, the most noble.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

Traditional westerns typify some of the hardships men face: you have to be rugged, silent, stoic. It's a man against nature, against the world.

When I play 'Grand Theft Auto,' I'm such a nerdy little law abider because I've always had this active imagination in which I sympathize and empathize with things.

I think it's a very powerful notion, the notion that our personal views, although closely held, are not necessarily right. That part of what is noble is making sure there are checks and balances and a plurality of opinions.

Being a lawyer, it's like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it's lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.

I need to be believe that dragons are real. I want them be a real thing.

I log on and there are so many cookies embedded in my computer - it's like they know what I need before I do.

America is built on the labors of the oppressed.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

I've been looking for a superhero I could tune into and relate to for years, and when nobody stepped in to take the place of 'Buffy' in my poor soul, I thought, 'Maybe I can create somebody!' That's how 'Headache' came to be.

I would say that, between us, I tend to be a little bit more philosophically optimistic. Jonah, I think he sees things as more finite.

I try not to look at press. However, I have a mother, who will gladly tell me what's going on out there.

I grew up in Asia, and I remember as a little kid being in Taiwan watching films there and being so awed by these new worlds of entertainment.

For me, I've always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.

If you play a game like 'Grand Theft Auto' you don't go home afterwards and cry because you ran over a couple characters, because you do not give them personhood.

I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.

I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

The appealing thing to me about Wonder Woman is the question of, who is this woman in tights and leotard walking around? What's her story and how does it resonate with women today?

The ways in which mankind tends to invent technology is because we have this drive to create and to innovate, and we don't necessarily pump the brakes when we're doing it.

I personally am not so obsessed about immortality for myself. The human body has been designed that way, obsolescence is OK.

But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.

I've always had a problem with over-identification with inanimate objects.

The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not 'dream big,' but strive big.

There are very few video games where there are - like, completely pacifistic - and if there are, I tend to play them - 'Dance Dance Revolution,' there was a game called 'Flower' that I really enjoy.

What does the future of 'Westworld' look like? I don't necessarily think that we've seen the last of these artificial worlds that are central to the concept of our series as a whole. But the major lens that we will have is going to be the real world.

We can understand both our nature and our nurture, but understanding is only the first step.

Don't just sit there dreaming; dreaming is the luxury of the rich.

The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.

Holding women to the idea of 'write what you know' subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it's also a chance to celebrate who we could be.

Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I'd wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I'd sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.

There's nowhere that looks like Singapore; it's absolutely beautiful on a purely aesthetic level.

One of the many delights that I found in directing was that you plan so many things so meticulously so that they go smoothly. But you also have to leave time and space for spontaneous emotional moments to arise.

Even though I grew up in America, at home we spoke mostly Chinese, because my mom is from Taiwan.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

The reality is that 'Westworld' is designed so that guests can indulge with impunity their every fantasy - be it light or dark. So the hosts experience the extremes in human behavior, good and bad.

For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.

Since time immemorial we've explored these ideas of tragedy, the things people do for love, the great weight that occurs when love is taken away and the great length and the heroism that people will exhibit to fight for the ones that they love.

I wanted to go to Harvard because it felt like it would be the Hogwarts Academy of law schools.

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

And I think the greatest danger that AI poses isn't so much these anthropomorphic beings who look like us and are beguiling are going to fool us. It's the fact that a intelligence without a body or corporeal form will fool us into trusting it with data, which we seem to think is... it has no repercussions.

The sad thing is I don't think I've seen 'Jurassic Park.' Not that it's not an amazing movie, I literally didn't watch film or TV until I was 23 or something.

What's so bad about Google knowing I need Kleenex? Look at it in the aggregate - see how information... can be used to target people based on their profiles and change the course of human history, as I believe it is already beginning to do. This knowledge that I need Kleenex has bigger complications than just needing Kleenex.

I've tried to always be incredibly overprepared in everything that I've done.

How many of us have these demons or habits or things we don't like about ourselves and understand the loops that we're in and yet are unable to break out of them and create lasting change within ourselves?

You know, both my parents aren't really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it's how I make a living.

Feeling trapped in identity isn't just the purview of women and minorities.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.