Edward Norton Quotes

I remember seeing Janet McTeer in A Doll's House. My grandmother took me and we had seats in the very back row, but her performance was so powerful - it was very accessible. I felt like I was much closer than I was.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.

I graduated on a Friday. By Monday, I was doing Shakespeare in the Park.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

I would love to do Shakespeare in New York.

I did a lot of Shakespeare touring when I was in college in Montana.

I've done two 'Hamlets,' two 'Lears,' three 'Midsummer Night's Dreams' - I've done most of these plays more than once, and every time I direct them, I learn things.

I'm not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.

I'll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of 'Richard III' in New York.

I'm as thrilled watching Mark Rylance do Shakespeare as I am watching 'The Book of Mormon.'

Doing theater is like walking a tightrope without a net.

The Color Purple received four Tony nominations; the play is highly looked at and it's a must see for everyone. I just want to carry on what Jennifer Hudson has done and help the team get to the finish line.

If a play is good and you're effective in it, you suddenly hear a silence that is loud, and that moment makes the whole schmageggy business of an actor or an actress worthwhile, because you suddenly know that they are human beings like you, who are receiving something from you.

My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.

To play Cleopatra on Broadway would just be incredible.

I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

I'll never forget John Heard doing Shakespeare In The Park with Raul Julia and Richard Dreyfuss. It was 30 years ago, I guess. It was Othello, and John Heard played Cassio, and while everyone else was "Acting!" Heard came on talking normal, and everyone in the audience was leaning in to follow him. I wasn't doing that in Bus Stop. I think in that performance, I was putting it out a little too much.

Performers love to perform - that's the thing that we do. I think one of the best things was being able to imagine anything that I wanted, anything that I came up with we could do, because this theater is unbelievable.

Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.

I think the most fun I ever had was playing King Arthur in Spamalot on the West End.

In terms of trying to improve as an actor, for me it's always important to return to the stage. After doing a piece of theater for a prolonged period, I can think I must have surely improved in some way as an actor - you must be fitter than you were prior to doing it. For me, theater is very, very important in keeping things fresh and dangerous.

There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. At one point he took the robes he was wearing and just started flipping them up in the air, out of nowhere. And later, an actor said to him, "What was that, George, what were you doing?" And he said, "They were sleeping." You're always trying to catch them.

I like drama as well. When I played Hamlet, I got one review that said, "This must surely be the funniest Hamlet in history," but schoolgirls would still cry when he died.

When I was about 16, I did a Neil LaBute play called 'A Gaggle of Saints' from a collection of plays called 'Bash' - very violent story about a young Mormon who goes to Central Park with his friend and beats up a gay guy. But it was the first thing I had ever done, and I thought, "God, this is fun! This is far more fun than anything else I've been doing at school. I want to stick with it."