Edward Norton Quotes & Sayings

I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass. — Edward Norton

People say you can't make movies about your politics or the environment. And, generally speaking, I completely divide those sides of my brain. — Edward Norton

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there. — Edward Norton

As we say in the sewer, if you're not prepared to go all the way, don't put your boots on in the first place. — Edward Norton

My greatest hope is that we transcend the most fearful thing, which is that we are rapidly degrading the ecological systems on this planet that support everything we are doing and all life on it. — Edward Norton

But look at Avatar [2009], one of the most globally viewed pieces of entertainment to have ever been made - the central emotional event of the whole movie was a tree being cut down. And the entire movie, essentially, is saying, "If we let the military industrial complex trash the place that we're living in, we will have committed an epic crime." — Edward Norton

I just like working with smart people. — Edward Norton

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity. — Edward Norton

Most of what I know about environmental conservation I learned from my father, who has been a leader within the movement for over 30 years. — Edward Norton

Young people know how to use these social networking tools, and they know how to use them effectively. — Edward Norton

You can do things in twin scenes now you couldn't before. You can implement actual moving cameras. — Edward Norton

You always end up getting involved in things because of, you know, the strange things your life brings you into contact with. — Edward Norton

David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense. — Edward Norton

When people come together too young, they try to become one person. As you get older, you realize that you don't want to become one person because then you lose the person you are. — Edward Norton

I like making movies for myself and my friends and people with my sensibility. — Edward Norton

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about. — Edward Norton

If Nick Broomfield never found anyone with affection for Courtney Love, it's only because he conspicuously avoided the countless friends, colleagues and fans who appreciate her talent and admire her as a person. But then, why would Broomfield have opened up his film to those of us who work with Courtney and are close to her when there are so many bitter left - behinds and desperate attention - seekers eager to validate his attack on her character? Inquisitors in every age, scared of forceful women, have used all kinds of half - baked testimony to whip up chants of 'Burn the witch!' — Edward Norton

The "environmental movement" is becoming an economic movement, is joining the social justice movement, is becoming a sustainability movement. It's leaving behind the "People's Needs versus Nature's Needs" conflict in favor of making the case for environmental health as the essential underpinning of prosperous and stable human civilization. — Edward Norton

I remember as a kid having the offer of a scholarship, that it was going to be like going to Mars, and deciding to stay in my public school. — Edward Norton

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up. — Edward Norton

When I was very small, I had that first-time-you-see-a-play experience, which immediately made me want to act, because it seemed like this incredible outlet for something I was already doing fairly compulsively anyway, which was putting on hats and costumes and doing funny voices. It was a very natural compulsion for me. — Edward Norton

My generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s. — Edward Norton

Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times. — Edward Norton

If you've got a piece and you can feel the person who's going to direct it is really made for it, if it's really special for them, then it's going to be a better-than-usual experience. — Edward Norton

I like to get into a lot of things besides movies. I've been very involved with a few specific efforts. We built this park in New York and it's been a very successful project.I worked on a conservation project in East Africa. Too much of this type of stuff can get you wrapped up in your own work and I love it. — Edward Norton

I'm not particularly precious about the theatrical experience any more. — Edward Norton

I'm a New Yorker, you know. — Edward Norton

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw? — Edward Norton

Sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors. — Edward Norton

There are things you do for the fun of doing them or to work or to hang with certain people. But the projects that I've invested myself in and cared about most deeply have absolutely been activated by a desire to chase something that I relate to, or that I see as having the potential to speak to someone else directly. — Edward Norton

I'd say that, in addition to actually taking my brother and sister and I camping and hiking and river rafting all our lives and introducing us to the power of natural landscapes, his [my father's] biggest impact on my thinking has been to always argue that the "spiritual case for Nature" was not going to outweigh the needs of 7 billion people and to insist that law, science and economics were the critical frameworks through which we had to defend the value of nature. — Edward Norton

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid. — Edward Norton

I like things that aren't superficially one thing or another. — Edward Norton

There is a lot of interesting product coming to market already. Bags and bottles and cups and such made of potato starch and other fully biodegradable materials. In some sense, plastic is more chemically complex. We ought to be able to simplify. — Edward Norton

People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies. — Edward Norton

I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I'm never sure how to get started. — Edward Norton

Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing. — Edward Norton

It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing. — Edward Norton

I knew Danny DeVito and he knew me, so he wanted me to try Death to Smoochy. I loved that stuff and had a great time doing it. — Edward Norton

I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things ... which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising — Edward Norton

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value. — Edward Norton

You dream as an actor's director of letting moments breathe through two-shots. — Edward Norton

Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition. — Edward Norton

On the downside, to paraphrase Thom Yorke talking about the music business, we're still having to deal with the stench of the last fart of the dying corpse of this regressive vision that America is a white, middle-aged, male, conservative country. — Edward Norton

I've been friends with the guys in Radiohead for a lot of years, and I watch the way those guys work with incredible envy. Because whatever the slings and arrows of dealing with the record business, at the end of the day, they have total creative autonomy. They don't need a lot to do what they do, and Thom [Yorke] and Jonny [Greenwood] and the guys have their own joint in their hometown. — Edward Norton

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it. — Edward Norton

It's a dream to be in a company of actors. — Edward Norton

Remarkably, there's no green screen in 'Leaves of Grass' movie. There is motion control. Technically, there were all sorts of challenges, but really the soul of it is Edward Norton talent. You write these characters when you write a movie, and all you can hope for or depend on is that your actors will elevate the material. — Edward Norton

For Keeping the Faith, I looked at [George ] Cukor's old films like The Philadelphia Story, stuff that's hilariously funny and really smart with a cutting critique in the humor, too. With this, when I read it, I was laughing a lot. — Edward Norton

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson]. — Edward Norton

I studied French forever, and when do I ever speak French? I clearly should have studied Spanish. I wish I had stuck with music, because that would still be great. I really wish I had learned to surf earlier in my life. — Edward Norton

You can't control everything that comes to you. — Edward Norton

I'm pretty busy in my life and I'm very aware of what it takes to direct a movie. It takes a lot out of you; it takes a lot out of the rest of your life, from other people in your life. I don't lie around hungering for that consumption very often. — Edward Norton

I think that the environmental movement is wisely moving away from a largely emotion-based argument for the spiritual or intrinsic value of Nature with a capital "N" and evolving toward a very hard-nosed case for the economic value of natural capital, ecosystem services, biodiversity, etc. — Edward Norton

I think technology is having a democratising effect on film. — Edward Norton

I've already spent a lot of my life doing what makes me go. There's a life out there while I'm still young, able to move, able to just sit at peace in the water - I should be spending much more time doing that, rather than continuing to go through this artistic struggle. — Edward Norton

Most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them. — Edward Norton

The elegance of staying with a moment, without needing to stop and change all the lighting, made [the alternative] seem lazy and indulgent. — Edward Norton

No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. — Edward Norton

Look, you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it. — Edward Norton

The deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something. — Edward Norton

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. — Edward Norton

It's better for people to miss you than to have seen too much of you. — Edward Norton

When I was about 16 or 17, I had a teacher who took a group of us to the National Theater in Washington, D.C., and I saw Ian McKellen do his one-man show - I think it was called Acting Shakespeare - and it completely bombed me; it put the zap on my brain in a big way. — Edward Norton

But at the same time, the film industry just got torched. The risk tolerance for the types of movies we're talking about is lower, and the reason for that is that the captains of the industry were asleep at the switch when their core business was being disrupted. And they're never getting it back. In a way, it makes it all the more exciting when the good ones get through. — Edward Norton

Suspension of disbelief and that whole question is part of the heart of the 'Leaves of Grass'movie. — Edward Norton

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script. — Edward Norton

I think we really feel like Crowdrise could be something that, 20 years from now, people take for granted because that's just how you do it, like if you're going to raise money for something, that's how you do it. — Edward Norton

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience. — Edward Norton

This place [USA] is exploding with young people who are - they're like Nietzsche's hammer - going to break everything and make something better. The creative energy in this country, and what people are coming up with is very hopeful. — Edward Norton

You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me. — Edward Norton

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard. — Edward Norton

People are worried about the degree to which corporate interest is starting to threaten human interest. — Edward Norton

If you feel like someone just knows what this is about to their core, they're going to have that special confidence in it.You stop looking at the seams and they start inhabiting the same space and start interacting with each . — Edward Norton

It must be good to be in Germany and France, because I have completely forgotten what it is like to be proud of your government. — Edward Norton

Even my wife and two of my children are in "Leaves of Grass". Because I love the source material so much, it was really easy to write and an utter delight to get to direct because I had people like Edward [Norton] elevating the material and surprising me in their interpretations of all of this stuff that's so close to me. — Edward Norton

People think because I went to Yale that that implies privilege, and it is a privilege in the sense that it's an incredible opportunity. — Edward Norton

If there's a criteria that really gets me interested in a work besides any type of personal interaction with the theme, it's if I feel like this is the right piece of work for that director at that moment in their career. — Edward Norton

The period western doesn't have a lot to say to most people today. — Edward Norton

I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through. — Edward Norton

Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful. — Edward Norton

I start to get fixated on a story and a character and an idea, and at a certain point, I really want to do it. It's a compulsion to explore a specific thing, as opposed to a compulsion to direct, generally speaking. — Edward Norton

I don't get much out of doing a red carpet. — Edward Norton

Fame is very corrosive and you have to guard very strictly against it. — Edward Norton

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions. — Edward Norton

To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there's a cinematographer, there're costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble. — Edward Norton

I grow tired of intelligence having such a limited manifestation in movies - "intelligence" usually meaning coastal, with a certain level of formal education. — Edward Norton

I've observed over and over that people seem to get a much deeper sense of fulfillment out of something they've done as an act of service than out of the things they do for themselves. — Edward Norton

If I'm trying to put size on for a role, then I don't do much running. — Edward Norton

Practiced poorly, tourism can be extremely negative. — Edward Norton

When I think about directing a film, the thing that stops me short is wondering if I'm a natural at it the way I think you, and PTA, and Fincher are born directors. Maybe some people's talent is in understanding the ways that film communicates, without dialogue, without plot. — Edward Norton

I don't think you should sit around and wait for people to give you an opportunity to express yourself or do your work, or whatever. Actors have to be producers and writers have to be producers. — Edward Norton

I just love movies. — Edward Norton

For me there's always a line or two in a script, when you hit it you almost decide to do the whole movie off a line or two. You almost do it for the fun of getting to say a line or two like that. I don't have any specific plans, you know. I mean, if Seth Rogen calls with a great buddy pic, I'll be there. — Edward Norton

You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label. — Edward Norton

What has always been most interesting about acting to me personally is that it affords you the chance to shift gears, both in terms of the experiences you get to have through doing it, but also the different kinds of things you get to represent. — Edward Norton

The Zionist Tulsa Jew who's pugnacious is a reality. I grew up around it. And I think it's really, really funny and surprising and unlikely. — Edward Norton

I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another. — Edward Norton

As an actor, if you step to the side and you look at [Thornton's performance] technically, and you try to imagine doing what he was doing, most people would panic. Most people would be on the set, and they would be panicking, going, "I'm not doing anything!" All the ham instincts in you would be screaming, "You've got to indicate something here." And it's beautiful, in a way. And so I appreciate, even as an audience member, the courage that it takes to be ... frankly, to be subtle. — Edward Norton

I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films. — Edward Norton