Edward Norton Quotes

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

You have to search for the best writer - I'm not saying I'm the one, but it's a bad idea to just find the person who is a copycat of Stieg Larsson.

I never said, 'Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of me.' That was a completely made-up quote.

I get so many scripts a day but none of them inspires me. If I get a good inspiring script, then I will be most happy to make it into a film.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

I don't want to steal anybody's story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign that it probably sucks.

I was reading scripts, doing coverage, for CAA. Reading hundreds and hundreds of scripts across the board, from blind submissions to 'Brokeback Mountain'. It was not always a pleasant task but something, in hindsight, I'm glad I did.

Whenever I hear the narration for a new film, I have this process back home where my mother reads all my scripts.

It's pretty rare that something I've written is close to something that's pre-existed.

I'm a big fan of Nora Ephron, who believed everything is copy, and I agree.

Isn't nearly every Hindi film a rehash of some movie or the other?

If your entire conception of what's possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you're going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There's nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that's your goal, but I've always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.

In order to get new things to rap about, you've gotta live.

It's very rare for me to come across a script for NYMF that is truly its own animal. That's really what appealed to me about 'Valueville.' I still have my notes from when I first read it.

Everyone always gets a little irritated by imitators, but mostly I'm flattered. What if you never did anything anyone wanted to copy?