Top 100 Quotes About Edward Norton: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Edward Norton

#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

#2. A couple of nights ago I had an erotic dream about Edward Norton.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#3. Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor.

Kevin Spacey

#4. With Edward Norton you'd never say, "This is the one we're going with whether you like it or not." It has to be agreed upon.

Edward Norton

#5. Look at someone like Edward Norton. A truly phenomenal actor. He's definitely went to school and trained.

Jason Statham

#6. I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.

Wes Anderson

#7. Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton are among my favorite actors.

Vance Joy

#8. I don't flatter myself - I'm not a scientist, I'm not a conservation expert.

Edward Norton

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Edward Norton

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Edward Norton

#22. 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

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

Edward Norton

#24. 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

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

Edward Norton

#26. 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

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

Edward Norton

#28. 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

#29. 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.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#31. 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

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

Edward Norton

#33. I do subscribe to the maxim that generally comedy is like jazz. Either you get it or you don't. You can't learn it and you can't be taught it. I don't think that if you are not a funny person, you can fake it.

Edward Norton

#34. 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.

Edward Norton

#35. See, I don't get the sense that you need to direct at all. Sometimes I get the opposite sensation from you, that you're like, "I really should go do something else." But then you are drawn back in by a particular story, like a hangnail in the brain.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#37. 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.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#40. People are worried about the degree to which corporate interest is starting to threaten human interest.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#42. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#45. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#48. It's nice when someone knows their lines.

Edward Norton

#49. 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

#50. 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

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

Edward Norton

#52. 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.

Edward Norton

#53. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#58. 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

#59. 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.

Edward Norton

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

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

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#70. 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

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

Edward Norton

#72. 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.

Edward Norton

#73. I think technology is having a democratising effect on film.

Edward Norton

#74. 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

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

Edward Norton

#76. In drama, I think, the audience is a willing participant. It's suspending a certain kind of disbelief to try to get something out of a story.

Edward Norton

#77. I'm not particularly precious about the theatrical experience any more.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#79. When a butterfly flutters its wings in one part of the world, it can eventually cause a hurricane in another.

Edward Norton Lorenz

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

Edward Norton

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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.

Edward Norton

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

Edward Norton

#86. 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

#87. I'm a New Yorker, you know.

Edward Norton

#88. I hear about actors being exterior actors and actors being instinctual actors and I always think it's crap. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that good actors do both - they do inside-outward and they do outside-inward. You can't not do both.

Edward Norton

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Edward Norton

#92. If two people are at completely different stages in their spiritual life, that can present a real problem.

Edward Norton

#93. 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

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

Edward Norton

#95. 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.

Edward Norton