Vera Farmiga Quotes

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

It's what people don't say that is often the most revealing.

It's almost better most times to not talk in a scene. I think you can actually express a lot more without words.

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 don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.

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.

I'm obsessed with subtexts. I love that we often don't say what we feel. That gap between the two. I like it when actors reveal a lot without having to say it.

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.

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.

I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.

None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.

Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning.

There's a voice in all of us, and you can only get expressive through words. There's a limit to what you can do without speaking.

There's timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there's more to it than you can see.

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

I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.

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

You don't want to hit readers over the head like they're completely incapable of picking up on subtlety.

Sometimes a couple notes are worth a thousand words.

Body language and tone of voice - not words - are our most powerful assessment tools.

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