I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.
Interpretation
Acting allows one to explore different worlds and experiences, providing a sense of freedom and adventure.
In this quote, Edward Norton expresses how acting serves as a form of escapism, granting him the ability to enter various realms and experience life in diverse ways. This 'secret key' symbolizes the unique opportunities that acting provides, allowing individuals to immerse themselves in different narratives and emotions, thus enhancing their understanding of the human experience.
In practice
In a speech about pursuing artistic passions, one might say, 'As Edward Norton puts it, acting is like having the secret key to every door, allowing us to explore new worlds.'
Look, you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.
I've observed over and over that people seem to get a much deeper sense of fulfillment out of something they've done as an act of service than out of the things they do for themselves.
Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things . . . which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising
Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.
Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances.
Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.
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