Edward Norton

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.

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 just love movies.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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