Quotes By Edward Norton

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

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.

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

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.

Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.

I think a lot of people in their average day actually imagine two sides of a conversation at one point or another. I think that the mental trick of holding two sides of a conversation in your head is actually something that we all do.

You can't control everything that comes to you.

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

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

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

I grew up on the golden age of children's TV.

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

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

When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want.

I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.

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

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

If I ever have to stop taking the subway, I'm gonna have a heart attack.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

My generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s.

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.

I think a lot of people relate to some of my characters' inner struggles.

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.