James Norton Quotes

It's not that I'm necessarily looking for things that are so dark and emotional. But if I see something where the character goes through enormous change, it's very appealing to play all those levels, and that is probably going to involve some dark moments.

To me, any character that is conflicted inside as well as outside of themselves is always a better role to play.

Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

When I started studying acting in New York, I didn't plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn't get out.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

By 30, I was separated from my husband, and I clearly remember sitting in my lovely office with a magnificent view, staring at a very lucrative pay stub, and bursting into tears because I was just miserable. So I had to make a decision: Keep following my plan, or be honest with myself and search for my true passion.

I like being able to play women that are growing or aren't easy to love. Maybe they are really likable, but they're annoying because they're not tapping into who they're suppose to be. You're watching them, and you're like, 'Oh, why does she keep making this decision?'

I had to learn some hard lessons in my early days because I was a bit of a showman, a kind of Jekyl and Hyde character.

What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

He went to Paris looking for answers to questions that bothered him so. He was impressive, young and aggressive, saving the world on his own.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.

When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.

I reached a point in my life where I didn't really like who I was.I was married to an amazing woman. I had children, and yet there was frustration.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.