I'm a huge sci-fi geek, and I also really get into all of the alien shows on the History Channel where you see air force pilots talking about UFOs - I love that stuff.

How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an 'illegal alien,' you've already stacked the deck against them.

Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite the fact that our world is the poster child for habitability.

I hated school. I travelled so much in my early years that I didn't understand the process. I felt suffocated - not like I was some grandiose artist; I just felt like an alien.

When you're growing up you also like to go out and party a lot, and the music that we would hear going out would be techno and electronica. And earlier stuff like the Prodigy. It kind of stood out from everything else. Y'know, 'Firestarter,' where did that come out of? It sounded alien and otherworldly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort.

Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.

I was really upset because I was branded as an enemy alien when I'm an American.

Real-life things, like spiders and snakes, that doesn't scare me, but if it's a monster or a ghost or an alien, that will always scare me.

I can't take 'The Room' and show it to an agent and say, 'Hey man, cast me in something.' It's an alien film.

I was naturalized right before Pearl Harbor. Nine days later, I would have been classified as an enemy alien. I might have been sent to a camp.

I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything. I would draw these pictures. I had hundreds of these pictures in a box.

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time.

Virtually any pointed edifice is considered a candidate for alien engineering. After all, how could the Egyptians or Mayans have possibly stacked up stone blocks into pyramids?

Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one's lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe.

Other kids could read, other kids could write, other kids could spell, they could do math. I felt like an alien. I felt like an outcast. I felt like, 'What is going to happen to me?'

The idea of women having a complete hold on their lives is still alien in a lot of places. So, it is important that we keep telling such stories where women are shown both physically and mentally powerful.

It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.

I find that 'Ghostbusters' and 'Alien' actually have a lot in common in that they're both so naturalistic in the performances. It feels like people you could be hanging out with right now in this room, yet they're on a spaceship or killing ghosts. But the way they talk is never heightened or otherwordly.