<smiling> "It was only a film."

I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour.

I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.

There’s a problem when you write for Hollywood in particular, they only read the dialogue. They call it reading down the middle. They have 10 scripts to read over the weekend, so all the bits that are in block prose, they won’t look at. But that’s the important stuff in the cinema. A cinematic script… they always say that you can watch a good film with the sound down.

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

The dialogue consists almost entirely of terse screams: Watch it! Incoming! Move! Look out! Fire! Move! The only characters I re­member having four sentences in a row are the anchors on cable news. … Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart.

The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)

(90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words),

So much they talked, so very little said.

Half-wits talk much, but say little.

The moment of silence stretched out as thin as the content of a congressman’s speech.

... it was once necessary to proclaim the entire doctrine of Yoga in the fewest possible words.... I did so.
“Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!”
The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage.