Edward Norton Quotes

The more you do your homework, the more you're free to be intuitive. But you've got to put the work in.

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

Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.

Sometimes we don't see certain things until we're ready to see them in a certain way.

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.

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

To cite my own alma mater, it's shocking to me that Yale University can teach what it teaches at the Yale School of Environmental Studies and utterly fail to mirror those values in any way in its investment practices.

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

The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.

I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of my government.

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.

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.

Anybody who is running a marathon or doing a walkathon, doing a fundraiser for their school, their company, by far it's guaranteed the easiest and most fun way to quickly set up a fundraising campaign and send it around to your friends and family.

Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.

At this point in my life I'm not bent on proving anything, really.

I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.

I don't have anything to prove to anybody, which is a lovely place to be.

Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.

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

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

Well, I don't feel that I've played so many bad guys, and I'm rot really drawn to villains per se. I think a lot of people relate to some of my characters' inner struggles.

Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend.

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.

I come from a family of conservation activists, and so I've had a strong connection to nature all my life. My father has been a leader within the movement for over thirty years and has taught most of what I know about environmental conservation. While he would always take me hiking, camping, and rafting, he also taught me that the spiritual value of the outdoors alone is not enough to save nature against economic interests.

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.

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.

You can't control everything that comes to you.

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

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

Screenplays aren't written to be read, they're written to be made into movies.

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.

There are so many people who are conscientious and caring about others. I've spent time working in countries where I really noticed the absence of civic concern, care for other people. I've been in other countries where I feel a palpable, almost tooth-and-claw attitude between people - Machiavellian, me and mine. And you can take for granted being here, with all the bloviating and the media, on a day-to-day level, people in this country are really pretty concerned for each other.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have this embedded faith in the process through which films of a certain type get discovered on longer timelines.