Edward Norton Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.”
-- Edward Norton

#Narrative #Documentaries #Kind

“The incentive for business is not, and cannot, be anything other than the root incentive for all business: they must profit.”
-- Edward Norton

#Roots #Incentives #Profit

“Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.”
-- Edward Norton

#Risk #Elements #Should

“To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there's a cinematographer, there're costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble.”
-- Edward Norton

#Jobs #People #Consistency

“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

#Acting #Homework

“David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense.”
-- Edward Norton

#Reading #Giving #Guy

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

#Meaningful #Networking #Use

“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

#People #Trying #Together

“The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.”
-- Edward Norton

#Magic #Disbelief #Bubbles

“If two people are at completely different stages in their spiritual life, that can present a real problem.”
-- Edward Norton

#Spiritual #Real #Two

“I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.”
-- Edward Norton

#Thinking #Answers #Film

“What has always been most interesting about acting to me personally is that it affords you the chance to shift gears, both in terms of the experiences you get to have through doing it, but also the different kinds of things you get to represent.”
-- Edward Norton

#Interesting #Acting #Different

“I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of my government.”
-- Edward Norton

#Government #Proud #Be Proud

“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

#Thinking #Fake #Taught

“I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films.”
-- Edward Norton

#Smoking #Fans #Want

“Most people don't relate to and can't generate concern for something they don't encounter personally or feel personally affected by. People have to have the palpable negatives in their lives dissected for them in ways that let them understand the root causes of unhealthy, unhappy conditions in their lives and then be allowed to really see and feel the positive alternatives.”
-- Edward Norton

#Roots #People #Unhappy

“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.”
-- Edward Norton

#Struggle #Character #Thinking

“Most of us still believe in the intrinsic value of nature, but I think the first century of the environmental/conservation movement demonstrated pretty clearly that this value cannot compel a civilization-wide shift toward sustainable behavior and enterprise when stacked up against the urgent economic and social needs of 7 billion people, most of whom are struggling to get out of poverty.”
-- Edward Norton

#Believe #Struggle #Thinking

“I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.”
-- Edward Norton

#Character #Layers #Deeper

“The "environmental movement" is becoming an economic movement, is joining the social justice movement, is becoming a sustainability movement. It's leaving behind the "People's Needs versus Nature's Needs" conflict in favor of making the case for environmental health as the essential underpinning of prosperous and stable human civilization.”
-- Edward Norton

#Civilization #People #Justice

“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

#Confused #Exercise #Reality

“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

#Spiritual #Moving #Thinking

“I'd say that, in addition to actually taking my brother and sister and I camping and hiking and river rafting all our lives and introducing us to the power of natural landscapes, his [my father's] biggest impact on my thinking has been to always argue that the "spiritual case for Nature" was not going to outweigh the needs of 7 billion people and to insist that law, science and economics were the critical frameworks through which we had to defend the value of nature.”
-- Edward Norton

#Spiritual #Brother #Father

“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

#Father #Years #Leader

“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

#School #Mirrors #Yale

“I think one of the most important investments an organization like TNC [The Nature Conservancy] can make is in helping build local capacity - supporting the growth of a global network of small community-based entities. Help people who live within critical ecosystems help themselves and their neighbors to design a better future relationship between themselves and their natural resources.”
-- Edward Norton

#Thinking #Organization #Ecosystems

“Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend.”
-- Edward Norton

#Cousin #Littles #Prestige

“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.”
-- Edward Norton

#Running #Moving #Eye

“I don't get much out of doing a red carpet.”
-- Edward Norton

#Red #Carpet #Red Carpet

“Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.”
-- Edward Norton

#Western