Television and Cinema Verities # 13

"I wanted a sense of a timeless, slightly decaying creature that, maybe, only has a limited life cycle of, maybe, four days like an insect.  The alien life form lived to reproduce, and in reproducing took on the characteristics of its last inhabitant and its new host...When Ripley blasts off from the Nostromo with the alien aboard, it's dying, which is why it moves so slowly  She kills it, but it would have died soon anyway.  It's like a butterfly."

- Director Ridley Scott discusses his concept of the titular "monster" in Alien (1979). Interview by James Delson, Fantastic Films # 12, November 1979, page 30.