David Cage Quotes

One of my favorite actors is Paul Newman. He could tell so much with a single look, whereas some actors would need an entire five page monologue to give off the feeling of what he could say with just a single look.

I enjoy playing characters where the silence is loud.

Tone has the living soul.

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Sarcasm doesn't read sarcastic in print.

Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

For me really good acting is about subtext.

The secret of it is to read what you've got in front of you. Don't, if you suspect that something has a double meaning, don't pause. Don't put on a leery vocal expression if you know what I mean on radio. Don't sort of do anything other than read it.

You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it.

Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

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

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.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

I always want to bring emotion across in a straightforward way. I don't want to get histrionic when I'm singing. For me that's just not interesting; it goes too far down one road.

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

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

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