Edward Norton Quotes

At a young age, I really wanted to make music and make my own sort of thing. I'm sure if it wasn't music, it would have been writing, or it would have been maybe painting. I just always had the drive to try and make something with my hands and to just pull something out of myself and shape it and see it in front of me, if that makes any sense.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

Without electricity, there can be no art.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

The Roots want to dip our toes into everything in the arts.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

If I would not be able to create music, I would create art or something else. Perhaps cooking.

In the deepest hour of the night I confess to myself three things; I would die if I was forbidden to write, forbidden to love, or forbidden to fashion....love each other, and celebrate the art and lifestyle of music.

I don't think music is done by any means. I would love to do it again but it's finding the right thing.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written - but not really of how they played. So I'd daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

People think, "Oh my god, you've been doing this job for so many years, it must get boring." It's like, "No, hell no," because I get to sing, I get to dance, I get to be on TV and in films, I get to do merchandising, licensing, show up at conventions, write, or take photographs for my book. There are so many different things going on for me that it never gets boring. It's always fun and interesting.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.