Dramatic Pause Quotes

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.

If my life was a play, age 35 was my intermission.

In film or TV work, you can have this amazingly dramatic pause, and they'll just edit it out.

With a monologue, you can be unendingly elliptical.

With a lot of contemporary musicals, the songs are like a calling card: the action stops for them.

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.

Shatner will spin lines in ways you don't see coming - he winds the audience down like a spring and hits the line so hard, they erupt. It's amazing to watch actually.

...the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.