John Cassavetes Quotes

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

I literally can't talk without moving hands.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

I move my face so much, because I'm very much expressive.

Go another step. Try to live one entire day without words at all. Do it not as a law, but as an experiment. Note your feelings of helplessness and excessive dependence upon words to communicate. Try to find new ways to relate to tohers that are not dependent upon words. Enjoy, savor the day. Learn from it.

People generally express more in between their sentences when they're not speaking. Words are usually there to disguise who someone is or what they're feeling.

I can watch anybody all day long if they're really doing what they're doing. I have a fascination with human behavior, watching people talk, when they pick at their face or how they hold their hand or if they're listening to you, if they're not listening to you.

Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious.

When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.

It is really hard to completely re-learn how to express yourself without using words. When you take away speech, you have to re-invent the way you express yourself. You have to exaggerate your body language and your facial expressions.

There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.

We don't communicate in full sentences anyway. We don't need all those words.

There is a world of communication which is not dependent on words.

I like my hands. They do most of the talking.

Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I'm animated.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression - all of that is very important.

Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.

There's a lot you can do without words.

I'm a very physical actor; everything I do is pretty much body-oriented. I sometimes am able to deliver information just with a look; my face does two or three different things, and it says it all.

I like to use my hands. When I was in theatre in college, that was one of my biggest notes: 'You use your hands too much.'

Breathing is always key in any character. When you have a character with no voice, that makes it even more important.

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.