Edward Norton Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.

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

Mathematicians seem to have no difficulty in creating new concepts faster than the old ones become well understood.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There are tens of thousands of charities and hundreds of thousands, getting towards millions, of people now using it. And when I flip through it, I'm just blown away by people.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.