Toni Morrison Quotes

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

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

It's a bold statement but I think people need to read between the lines.

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.

It isn’t what you say that counts, it’s what you don’t say

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

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

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.

I think that if you can convey a kind of a complexity, a mystery, a truth in stillness, that, to me, is really worth striving for, and I totally agree with Michael Fassbender in that less is more. If it's going on inside you, the camera will find it.

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

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

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.

Even silence speaks.

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

There is something exciting when you see people who are very formal talking with each other, and there is a sense that they have chosen to be that way. There is something masked that is more interesting to me than just people who are intent on displaying their uniqueness or whatever.

Tone matters more than words.

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

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.