Top 100 Edward Norton Quotes

#1. I had a huge advantage with Edward Norton because he's directed a movie before, so one thing he appreciates is how hard my job is, he's very sensitive to that. We actually ended up finishing "Leaves of Grass" a day early.

Edward Norton

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#2. 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

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#3. 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

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#4. 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.

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

Edward Norton

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#6. As we say in the sewer, time and tide wait for no man.

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#7. 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.

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#8. 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

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#9. 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

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#10. I thought Rounders was a comic movie in its way. First time I directed a movie, I wanted to do a comedy. I don't like things that are superficially one thing or another, mainly. My favorite comedies are really smart, too, and have a lot of levels to them as well.

Edward Norton

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#11. 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.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

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#13. 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

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#14. I'm a Tulsa Jew and I have a religious upbringing.

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

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#16. Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Edward Norton

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#17. 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.

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

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#19. 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.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

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#21. Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.

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#22. No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.

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

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

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#25. I like music, but I need to get outside more.

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#26. You know when somebody really knows what they're drawing from and you can feel it when you see the movie.

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#27. Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.

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#28. 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

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

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

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#31. 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.

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#32. You can do things in twin scenes now you couldn't before. You can implement actual moving cameras.

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#33. When I'm looking for Zen and I'm not saying this facetiously at all - I would really rather surf, scuba dive, or fly my plane. And, when I feel tension about the grind of work, it's not getting the money to make films versus making films that constitutes the grind, it's all this stuff.

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

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#35. You can't control everything that comes to you.

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#36. 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.

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#37. As an actor, I don't have any politics. As an actor, I'm driven more by an authentic - I would say an obsessive-compulsive-disorder level-fixation on mimicry, tonality of voice, to literally imitate something until I can just disappear into it.

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#38. 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.

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#39. 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.

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#40. 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.

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

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

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#43. 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.

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

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

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#46. I like making movies for myself and my friends and people with my sensibility.

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#47. 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.

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#48. I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways.

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

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

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

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

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#53. 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.

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#54. 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.

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#55. 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?

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#56. What we set out to do with this movie [Leaves of Grass] was to create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions. A movie that could be poignant and funny, and suddenly quite violent. To have a character utterly sideswiped, and to learn that life is about balance.

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

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#58. 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.

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

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#60. 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.

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

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#62. 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.

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

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#64. The thing I'm absolutely convinced of, no matter how crazy - technological the world is getting, is that people feel more connected through the good works. Entertainment, and the sort of soporific effect it has on people and their stress, is one thing.

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#65. I like things that aren't superficially one thing or another.

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

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

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

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

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

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#71. When the tides of life turn against you
And the current upsets your boat,
Don't waste those tears on what might have been,
Just lie on your back and float.

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#72. 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

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#73. When you have a pipe salesman with a business called Macabee Pipes, I'd say you've got your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.

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#74. 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

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#75. Obviously plastics have served very important purposes and been incredibly convenient but as we begin to witness the long-term consequences of the chemical components leaching into our water and our bodies, we're going to be forced to look for alternatives to how we package goods and food.

Edward Norton

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#76. 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.

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

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#78. The incentive for business is not, and cannot, be anything other than the root incentive for all business: they must profit.

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#79. Suspension of disbelief and that whole question is part of the heart of the 'Leaves of Grass'movie.

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#80. I just like working with smart people.

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#81. 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.

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#82. 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.

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#83. 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.

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#84. Identical twins are endemically alike in many ways.

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#85. I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

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

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#87. Practiced poorly, tourism can be extremely negative.

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

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#89. 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

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#90. Making really great music, making really great films, writing great books is an antidote to all of that. And, as people, as artists, some of the massive disruption that technology is causing is so exciting, the way that people can share creativity now.

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#91. Unpopular speech is absolutely vital to the health of our nation.

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

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#93. The film industry needs to confront the physical footprint of the way films get made.

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#94. 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 .

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

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#96. You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label.

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#97. 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.

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#98. It's a dream to be in a company of actors.

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#99. 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.

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

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