Damon Lindelof Thinking Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

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

That depends on whether or not he likes you. He is inclined to nickname you based on the way that you look. He is sort of the ugly part of us that says the things we may be thinking but are afraid to say. The only endearing name he has for anyone is Kate.

I stand by the Lost finale. It's the story that we wanted to tell, and we told it. No excuses. No apologies. I look back on it as fondly as I look back on the process of writing the whole show. And while I'll always care what you think, I can't be a slave to it anymore. Here's why: I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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