Edward Norton Quotes

If you're making music for all the right reasons, people are going to be receptive to that and appreciate it the same way you did when your were writing it.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

I only record songs that I really like and believe in and can sing with conviction.

The films that have influenced me and the films that have motivated me and inspired me were films that resonated, films that made me think after I saw them.

If I'm not invested emotionally, the artwork doesn't feel emotional.

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

I need to let people know who I am and instead of just trying to make great records, just be honest and make it more personal and make it more passionate, to make records with emotion and not be afraid to express that.

You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.

When I'm picking songs for an album I always want a song that I can relate to and that I have experienced. There's nothing worse than watching an artist try and sell a song that isn't believable coming from them.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

Most of all I want to make pop music that has something real behind it.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

I have to have the 'umph.' I've got to feel it, because if it's not getting through to me, the audience sure as hell aren't going to feel it either.

The most important thing I can say is to make music that moves you. Don't try and chase what's on the radio or what you think people want to hear.

The best music is the music which brings out something of you that you didn't know was there before, or you did know was there but had avoided.

Hopefully, by the time I do a project, I already have a true understanding and love of what I'm about to do because if I don't, I'm not going to work on that project. I really want to have those connections so I can be truthful to the emotional aspect of what I have to deliver for the story.

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

The most incredible part of seeing people embrace and recognize my music is experiencing the lives of people when they are powerfully affected, encouraged, and personally impacted.

It's important for me to write songs that feel good to sing every night and remind me of my core, truest beliefs.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.

The music that I make is pretty sincere; it's from my heart and I love it, and what just happened is more people have started to connect with my heart, and I haven't followed some kind of marketing scheme.

You will never draw the sense of a thing unless you are feeling it at the time you work.