Edward Norton Quotes

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The color of truth is gray.

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.

I always have sort of been someone who has contradictory parts, and I haven't tried to uncomplicate myself. I've sort of let things seem contradictory, and sometimes it really confuses people. I don't know if it's working all the time, but I'd rather do that than try to sell myself as one thing or another.

I think the most interesting characters are those in which you can see both sides.

For nothing was simply one thing.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

It's rare that movies can sort of capture the tone of life; movies always feel like they have to be one thing or another.

We're so quick to go to make things black and white, and to put things in their box. But everything is this mixture - and that's what this world is - is this blend of different things.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

I like characters who are contradictory.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

All of us, we are not one thing: we're always between two worlds, and the idea of not being sure is very appealing to me.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.