Quotes About Subtext

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

You can't be a passive recipient of images, you have to engage with images and read their subtexts. These are critical things that will be taught to the students by a film club.

It's funny: sometimes with 'Spaced,' people would try and read too much into something I'd done, with the references meaning something more than they do.

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside. (165)

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

Lily, our last girl, had rather a clever habit of using that pan for two vegetables at once" meant You're making too much mess. "Perhaps you'd like a cup of tea, Will" actually meant I have no idea what to say to you. "I think I've got some paperwork that needs sorting out" meant You're being rude, and I'm going to leave the room.

There was a volume to what was not being said.

Words are lies. It's what's beneath the words that has any hope of being true.

In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Sometimes, what's not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.

He did not know how to make her understand that he would be happy, most happy, to become her husband in his turn. He certainly could not tell her that, now, at this moment, in this place, in the presence of this corpse; nevertheless he could, he believed, find one of those ambiguous, acceptable, complicated statements whose words have hidden significance, and which can, by their calculated reservations, express everything you intend.

Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.

Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

It isn't what you say that counts, it's what you don't say.

I'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.

In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away.

Do you think she was gay before or after she started watching Xena?" the male squirrel asked. "That subtext works like a nasty termite. It undermines the structure of human females from within.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more… most of the time we're inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it's out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said.