Unspoken Conflict Quotes

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Private grudges give rise to public measures. [Such matters] lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

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.

There's a lot of girls in the division I really like, but I always feel like there's this underlying sense of a potential matchup, potential competition. It adds a different element.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not - silence is the sharper sword.

I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.

I might have lost an acquaintance because of 'Pregnant Women Are Smug.' But we weren't close. Actually, I don't know if the woman knows the song is about her. I have a feeling she might.

For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.

I've had it with you and your emotional constipation!

There's timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there's more to it than you can see.

When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious.

There was a lot of stress and assumptions made without me even saying anything, which was very upsetting.

After a couple losses, I normally wouldn't say anything to my wife in the morning, just kind of grunt and grumble and grab my coffee and get on my way out.

If there is a problem, and you don't say anything about it, it's like a cancer and it becomes bigger.

We're fond of pointing out that we've known each other for over 25 years now and not once sat down alone to have dinner together. We pretty much avoid spending whatever time together that we can.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, news, TV, the Internet.

I don't get it when girls say 'I'm fine' but don't mean it.

I enjoy sometimes focusing on a character in a scene that's not actually doing the main action or the talking.

If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.

I was very aware of office politics because I was so baffled by them. So much so goes unsaid. No one says 'you're a cheeky so-and-so,' no one says 'you're so moody,' nobody ever confronts anyone else about anything. But I'm very crass, and I'm very confrontational, and I have a temper. I had to be hyper-vigilant in every office I worked in.