Edward Norton Quotes

I can't distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.

I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.

As a creative person you just get an idea in your head, and sometimes you just can't shake it off.

I learned long ago, back with 'Lover Revealed,' that my job is to sit at the computer, shut up and type. Otherwise? The pictures and the voices go away!

It makes it harder to write if I watch a lot of television, because television is not like a written story.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

I can't believe that I've written my best work yet. If I believed that, then I wouldn't bother releasing music anymore.

Once I get on something, once I have something that I'm working on, then I become very obsessive. In a good way. I mean,... is there a positive way to say obsessive? It's a good thing and if you're out there and you're working on something right now and you're crazed and you're up in the middle of the night, or you can't stop thinking about it, or you have to keep reading other things about the subject that you're working on or whatever. That's good and I think that's necessary creatively.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

It's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily.

Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

Delay and indecision are first weapons in the armory of moviemakers.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

If I don't shut down my brain soon, my imagination will take off so far about what could be with this guy, that nothing will ever just be.-- Norah, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Books are a narcotic.

Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.