Implicit Meaning Quotes

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

One of the most admirable things about history is, that almost as a rule we get as much information out of what it does not say as we get out of what it does say.… history consists of two equal parts; one of these halves is statements of fact, the other half is inference, drawn from the facts. To the experienced student of history there are no difficulties about this; to him the half which is unwritten is as clearly and surely visible, by the help of scientific inference, as if it flashed and flamed in letters of fire before his eyes. When the practiced eye of the simple peasant sees the half of a frog projecting above the water, he unerringly infers the half of the frog which he does not see. To the expert student in our great science, history is a frog; half of it is submerged, but he knows it is there, and he knows the shape of it.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient of the iceberg principle - three-fourths of the substance under the surface. He comes closer that way to retaining the magic of the original, unexpressed idea or emotion, which is always more stirring than any words. But just try and do it!

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

The emoji still doesn't really speak to the complexity that actually - or the subtext that goes on between when people actually speak face-to-face.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

The true poem rests between the words.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

I'm obsessed with subtexts. I love that we often don't say what we feel. That gap between the two. I like it when actors reveal a lot without having to say it.

The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

I like playing guys where it's as important what they're thinking as what they're saying. Those are the people I like playing, and the actor that I strive to be. I like actors who work in that area and I like parts that allow me to work in that area.