D. W. Griffith Quotes

When I was a little boy, there was no sound in the movies.

When you speak of silent movies, everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin first.

I used to watch movies - silent movies - and stock companies and theater whenever I could.

I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film.

My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.

I'm obsessed with those old romance films. I also would love to venture into the silent film world. I think that's extremely compelling and interesting and really relies on the acting, even more so than when you have an actor speaking.

I would've been a really big silent movie star.

For me, I loved it. I only want to make silent movies now.

I'm one of those people who says, 'yes, cinema died when they invented sound.'

I was always a big fan of Charlie Chaplin movies. I love 'The Great Dictator' and 'City Lights.'

My great-grandfather played organ for silent movies. Talkies in, Gramps out.

Friends told me not to bother with the silents - they're jerky, poorly photographed and ludicrously badly acted. But I was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of these films.

I grew up on Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and those were the ones who inspired me.

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

I'm a big fan of silent cinema and I think that before I got into the canon of European arthouse cinema, the first interesting films I liked as a kid were German expressionist silent films.

When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'

I've always been a follower of silent movies. I see film as a visual medium with a musical accompaniment, and dialogue is a raft that goes on with it.

In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors' gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.

For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.

I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.

Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.

John Gilbert was perfectly willing to jump into talkies. He had as good a voice as Clark Gable. There was such a divide between the silent and talkies. There was no logic to who survived and who didn't.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.