Vanessa Kirby Quotes

Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don't give you all the information.

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

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.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

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

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

For me really good acting is about subtext.

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.

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

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

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

Keep everything in context, and try to have each line doing more than one thing - not just giving exposition but also revealing character and history, etc.

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.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

When you do scenes that are just exposition, they feel false.

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

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

Doing film and television demands a kind of simplicity. If you think something differently, the camera will pick it up.

For me, everything about the telling is guided by tone. It's a bit mysterious; it's either there, or it isn't.

I didn't like characters that were one- or two-dimensional. I liked a guy to have a lot of different levels to him and layers, and I think I pretty well succeeded with Thanos.

If actors are trying to convey, in a smart way, the context of the scene, that becomes too self-conscious.