Jeffrey Dean Morgan Quotes

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich.

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.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.

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

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.

I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn't said - the silences.

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

The greatest acting really is spoken without words, or at least I like to think that.

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.

You know the thing about a picture being worth a thousand words? A look can be worth a million.

There is a tendency to underestimate the power of what we can do without words. Sometimes you can make a scene even more powerful and precise without dialogue.

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

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.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.

One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.

I like acting with no lines because all of a sudden you're able to express things without always worrying about the text. It's great to have a great text, but there's a lot of stuff you can't say in words, and I think there's something really nice about good physical moments.

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.'

I watched season four of 'The Wire.' They have subtle performances that they do through their eyes. You could watch season four with the audio off and still understand what's happening through their eyes.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

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

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

I remember seeing the performance Samantha Morton did in 'Sweet and Low Down' where she didn't speak at all, and I loved it so much because she got to do so much work just by expressing herself in her body and her face. With expressions, it wasn't necessary to speak. I find that appealing.