Jermaine Fowler Quotes

Sometimes with good writers you don't spot the theme, but when you come away you realise there has been one.

I like shows or films or books that have messages but don't beat people over the head with them.

The secret of it is to read what you've got in front of you. Don't, if you suspect that something has a double meaning, don't pause. Don't put on a leery vocal expression if you know what I mean on radio. Don't sort of do anything other than read it.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Some actors are better with words than me. I prefer to play it rather than say it - and keep people thinking.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

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.

For me really good acting is about subtext.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

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.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

Word - that invisible dagger.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.