Todd Haynes Quotes

With young people, it's how brassy and flashy can you be. But you get a bit older, it's about how restrained can you be. You have to feel it all, think it all, but you don't have to play it - it's just gotta be there, and if the story's good and the script's good, people will see it.

I'm almost sometimes too subtle in my acting.

I like to be subtle, without being too obvious.

Everybody thinks performance capture is about thrashing around and doing a lots of movement, but it's actually about being able to contain and think and be believed in a close-up, as much as anything else.

A lot of people tend to chew up the scenery. I'm a firm believer in less is more, especially on the big screen.

I have never been one for the over-the-top.

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

I was the most subtle person in the world.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

There is a bearing which comes from having a little bit of something withheld. In acting classes, they always say don't reveal 100 percent: it's much more interesting.

I'm really not someone who is drawn to something that's in your face, it feels a little forced.

I'm understated in my approach.

I don't believe in being loud. I find that stupid. Understated things work much better.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

As an actor, you think you have to go really far and deep and cry and yell to be good in a scene. Sometimes that's not the point.

Part of my aspiration as a film actor is to bring subtlety to everything I do - honesty but subtlety.

You put so much of yourself out there as an actor. You show the many facets of who you are when you're performing - or who you could be - you show yourself angry, upset, sad, vulnerable. The one thing I keep as my own private secret is the music.

If a young lady has that discretion and modesty without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more than on displaying what she has.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.

I am not... totally unreceptive to colour providing it makes its appearance quietly, deferentially, and without undue fanfare.

One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'

I believe in art that conceals art.