Quotes from Edward Norton

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Identical twins are endemically alike in many ways.

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

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.

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

You can't control everything that comes to you.

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

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.

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

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

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