Thomas Newman Quotes

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

There is a bearing which comes from having a little bit of something withheld. In acting classes, they always say don't reveal 100 percent: it's much more interesting.

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.

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

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

I don't ever feel that it's necessary to say certain things. I think we can be very suggestive. I think we can allude to certain things.

And isn't it better really to leave things only hinted at?

I had to learn that a good actor, like an iceberg, reveals only a small part of his ability on the surface. You suggest; you don't serve on a platter. You hold back. You don't expose it all to view. That's the way to put the audience's imagination to work.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.

But then, even with sex, I'm more in the school of less is more in movies.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

There are elements of irony in my work, of course.

One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

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

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

I find that, maybe because I'm also a singer, I hear music in characters all the time, even if they don't sing. I hear what affects me in my heart.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

Always sing below your potential.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I'd love to tell actors about all the things they don't need to worry about. Less is more. If you have it inside, you don't need to show too much. People pick up on things.