Graham Moore Quotes

#1. My mother, she worked in the mayor's office in Chicago when I was growing up and has been in democratic politics for a long time.

Graham Moore

#2. Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that's impossible to break is the solution at the end.

Graham Moore

#3. Arthur thought about this, and decided quite rationally that lying was by far the best approach to take.

Graham Moore

#4. There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery

Graham Moore

#5. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

Graham Moore

#6. I'm just this committed dilettante. I think what I've found is that I've tried to do a lot of different things in my life and discovered I'm not as good at them as I'd want to be.

Graham Moore

#7. I was not a successful TV comedy writer.

Graham Moore

#8. It is the people no one imagines anything from who do the things no one can imagine

Graham Moore

#9. In my experience, depression was not something that has been cured so much as managed, like a lot of illnesses.

Graham Moore

#10. I think everyone practices their Oscars acceptance speech with a shampoo bottle, and I've done my fair share of them. It's really surreal to be able to do it in real life.

Graham Moore

#11. I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

Graham Moore

#12. Inept lying was almost as good as honesty.

Graham Moore

#13. I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere. You do. Stay weird. Stay different, and then when it's your turn and you are standing on this stage please pass the same message along.

Graham Moore

#14. Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don't feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they're said to be blossoming.

Graham Moore

#15. 'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him.

Graham Moore

#16. No worn, ink-drenched leather journal for the period from October 11 through December 23, 1900, could be found.

Graham Moore

#17. I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.

Graham Moore

#18. Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn't mean he'll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.

Graham Moore

#19. Bankers all wanted to be princes. Professors all wanted to be Martin Luther.

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#20. If you know someone's secret, what power does that give you? How much power does that really give you? What can you do with secrets?

Graham Moore

#21. The only way for something human to feel human is to convince others that it is.

Graham Moore

#22. Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren't brothers. Plot points didn't leave behind grieving sisters who couldn't find their shoes.

Graham Moore

#23. Paranoid theorizing was too easy, too emotionally satisfying.

Graham Moore

#24. Arthur had never challenged a man to a duel, but in this moment he understood the magnificent reasonableness of the tradition. It was either that or slugging him outright this very second, which didn't seem nearly so gentlemanly.

Graham Moore

#25. When I was 16 years old I tried to kill myself because I felt different and that I didn't belong. Now I'm here, and I want this moment to be for that kid who feels weird or different. Stay weird, stay different.

Graham Moore

#26. I have writer friends who go to the premiere of a film with their name listed as the writer, but they are shocked: 'That's not what I wrote!'

Graham Moore

#27. A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing's life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film.

Graham Moore

#28. If the day hadn't yet convinced him of the merits of women's suffrage, it had certainly convinced him of the justness of the movement for Rational Dress.

Graham Moore

#29. I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

Graham Moore

#30. Gray fall light came through the nine square glass panes. On days like this, the strips of white wood that separated the glass seemed brighter to the eye than did the window light.

Graham Moore

#31. When I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of a guy who can wander into the confusion of life and sort of pluck out answers at will.

Graham Moore

#32. It takes a shock to the system, doesn't it, to make a man realize what good things he has.

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#33. The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you're ever given a thing.

Graham Moore

#34. would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn

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#35. I love the filmmaking process. It can be loud sometimes, and people love having conference calls, so working on a book is the polar opposite. It's very relaxing.

Graham Moore

#36. We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top.

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#37. I feel very Midwestern at my core.

Graham Moore

#38. Love grew commendably dependable - love was eggs, love was ham, love was the morning paper.

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#39. Depression is internal. The upswings and downswings have pretty much nothing to do with what's going on in the external world. It's not like something sad happens to you and then you feel sad. Good things happen, but you feel sad anyway.

Graham Moore

#40. Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.

Graham Moore

#41. I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.

Graham Moore

#42. I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.

Graham Moore

#43. I believe it is worthwhile trying to discover more about the world, even if this only teaches us how little we know.

Graham Moore

#44. I was a sound engineer. That was my day job when I started writing.

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#45. A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse.

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#46. Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.

Graham Moore

#47. Some writing one had to do in the dark.

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#48. I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I've known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him.

Graham Moore

#49. Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.

Graham Moore

#50. General Electric.' It has a rather nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Graham Moore

#51. He's just a man," said Paul. "No matter what The Sun says about him."
"He makes miracles. Lightning in a glass bottle. Voices in a copper wire. What kind of a man can do that?"
"A rich one.)

Graham Moore

#52. Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'

Graham Moore

#53. Sometimes I hate it so much," she said. "Always having to pretend." Paul gripped her fingers tighter. "This is America," he said. "We're all pretending.

Graham Moore

#54. A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place - that was loneliness.

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#55. Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider.

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#56. The human mind thrills at few things so much as making connections. Discovering. Solving.

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#57. The enduring appeal of mystery stories for all of us is that the world is a pretty confusing place. There's a lot of really unanswered things, and perhaps the scariest notion would be that there might not always be answers out there for us.

Graham Moore

#58. [In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended. - THOMAS EDISON R

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#59. When I was a teenager, I was a huge computer nerd. I went to computer programming camp. I went to space camp.

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#60. I liked Columbia, but it was like high school in that there was this big social world that I was not part of. I existed on the side, far away. That might be temperamental, my own fear of large groups, more than anything else. But I had a handful of professors who meant a lot to me.

Graham Moore

#61. When I first starting writing, and no one was paying me, in order to feel like I had a real job, I would get out of bed, put on a jacket and tie every morning, and sit down at my desk.

Graham Moore

#62. He would have achieved victory and rebellion at the same time.

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#63. Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.

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#64. Being bad at stuff is hard, and we all deal with it every day because we're all bad at stuff.

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#65. I like historical things; I like researching things.

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#66. Women now seek to involve themselves in the life of their government because their government has involved itself in their lives!

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#67. I think we all feel like weirdos for different reasons.

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#68. Everyone has strange teenage years. It's not like I can claim some particularly unique set of high school horrors. I think I was just an awkward kid who never felt comfortable in his own skin. I think I was alone a lot by circumstance and then by choice.

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#69. Realism, I think, is fleeting. It's the romance that will live forever.

Graham Moore

#70. One thing that I always loved about, say, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', is that Indiana Jones gets the Ark of the Covenant about sixty percent of the way through the movie. And then the rest of it is get-out-alive. To me, that's really cool. Because he's the one you care about at the end of the day.

Graham Moore

#71. Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.

Graham Moore

#72. Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.

Graham Moore

#73. Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.

Graham Moore

#74. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.

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#75. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.

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#76. Everyone remembers the pop-quiz hotshot bit from 'Speed' because it's extremely funny, and it's really smart and really witty. And the notion that action movies can have dialogue that pops just as well as the explosions is something that I hope more people continue to remember.

Graham Moore

#77. His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention.

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#78. I did an adaptation for a movie called 'The Devil in the White City' by Erik Larson for Warner Brothers. I love that book.

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#79. What an imprecise science was medicine. It was more an art than was fiction.

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#80. Where the first America was brilliant, the second was ingenious. What

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#81. One doesn't lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.

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#82. Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing - extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas.

Graham Moore

#83. Depression is something I've dealt with every day of my life.

Graham Moore

#84. One of the tricky things about sort of larger, comic-book action movies is that the scale is so big that they have to save the world at the end of every movie, and so at the end of each of the films, either Chicago or New York end up getting obliterated.

Graham Moore

#85. Poor people all think they deserve to be rich," he continued. "Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.

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#86. Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.

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#87. I think I always felt like an outsider, like a weirdo.

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#88. Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they're social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That's the goal.

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#89. Chicago will forever be in my heart," she said. "It is the Paris of the Middle West.

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#90. Arthur narrowly avoided tripping over his own skirt as he hurried out of the ladies' powder room in full pursuit.

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#91. I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.

Graham Moore