Edward Norton

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Identical twins are endemically alike in many ways.

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.

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'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'm a New Yorker, you know.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The more you do your homework the more youre free to be intuitive. But youve got to put the work in.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.