256 Quotes by Edward Norton

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

I’ve already spent a lot of my life doing what makes me go. There’s a life out there while I’m still young, able to move, able to just sit at peace in the water – I should be spending much more time doing that, rather than continuing to go through this artistic struggle.

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.

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.