Top 30 Subtext Quotes

With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from – what he means by this or by that.

Peter Morgan’s writing is so much about what you don’t say: you’re saying one thing but there’s 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov… they’re masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

It’s always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side – we are doing very well – and the other things are not solving – they’re compounding.

I like to really know what every scene is about, what the text is, what the subtext is. Then I figure out how to express that when I’m shooting.

‘Ocean’s Kingdom’ is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance – it’s not about anything except its water-logged plot.

With Shakespeare, there’s no subtext; you’re speaking exactly what you’re thinking constantly.

I think the benefit of being a writer is that I’m looking for the subtext on the page, because all good writing has subtext. And as a writer, you look at the big scope of things, the big story, rather than just your individual story line, because I think it’s important to know what you’re in and how you fit into it.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You’re putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It’s got to be aesthetically pleasing; it’s got to have subtext; it’s got to convey information.

Celebrity poverty, that’s the hidden scandal in Blair’s Britain. You can’t help but worry for them. A girl I knew developed X-ray eyes for celebrity sorrows. She taught me to read the subtext of the down-market celebrity interview, she knew all the Hollywood codes, and followed the deep backgrounds.

Theatre is different. We can spend two weeks around a table talking about subtext. In opera, there is a score, and people already know their parts. And they move differently. I find all this liberating.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don’t necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We’d watch stand-up on TV, and he’d tell me the subtext of what they were saying.

Shakespeare doesn’t really write subtext, you play the subtext.

If you look at my body of work, there’s always a dark side to my characters. They’ve always got a skeleton in the closet; they’ve always got a subtext.

I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other – that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.

The prevailing subtext of every dating book is that beautiful women are surpassingly obtainable, so long as you get over the intimidation that keeps you from approaching them. That’s maybe the dumbest advice ever.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is – literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

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.

There’s a certain kind of idealism attached to ‘Tusk’ as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there’s this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records, but if you were a kid, you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn’t always say – you wouldn’t dare say it was beautiful.

I don’t even know if I always entirely get what I’m trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there’s so much more, too, that’s implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.

Five decades ago, as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: ‘After Nehru, who?’ The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: ‘After Nehru, what?’

The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer’s movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.

All of Wes Anderson’s films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all.

Once you start putting in political subtext, it does create intellectually challenging science-fiction, but with ‘Pacific Rim,’ I always thought it would be a shame if kids couldn’t go see this movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters because it seemed to have a political point of view.

There’s no subtext in ‘Harry Potter,’ really; it’s all magic – anything can happen. Why do I say this? Because it’s a magic spell. It’s quite nice in a way. There is a real freedom to it. Doesn’t say much for acting, does it?

Personally, I don’t think we could do such a show if we didn’t get along. The subtext of all this is that we’re women in a show so we can’t possibly get along. It’s not like they write about The Sopranos like that.

When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.