Graham Moore Quotations

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!'

I like historical things; I like researching things.

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.

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

I think we all feel like weirdos for different reasons.

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

I was not a successful TV comedy writer.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The representation of gay characters on screen is important for us all to think about because there are sadly too few representations of gay characters on screen in mainstream cinema. If Marvel starts making movies about gay superheroes, then we'll be in a really great place. We're not at that place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're going to make a film, and you're going to have dialogue, and you want to take the characters seriously, let's understand what they're saying. If there is going to be technical dialogue, let's render it in a way that the audience can understand it and expect that it's not going to be so far over their heads.

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.

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.

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

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

Stay Weird, Stay Different.

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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.