Show Don't Tell Quotes

I never heard Jack Nicklaus say, 'I'm a great player,' or Tiger Woods, as a matter of fact. They just get out and do it. And I think that's far more appealing... than talking about how good you are.

We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.

You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.

There are a couple of writers I admired who were very good at giving the character's emotion without stating what that emotion was. Not saying "He was feeling tense," instead saying, "His hand squeezed harder on the chair arm," as if staying outside the guy. I wanted to try doing that. I wanted to have a really emotional story in which the characters' emotions are never straight - out told to you, but you get it.

Choose as a guide one whom you will admire more when you see him act than when you hear him speak.

You don't want to have a character say what's bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

Some things are better done than said.

John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone - those guys are consummate filmmakers. They believe that you don't talk it, you show it. So when I find a role now, I try to find a visual way to tell what the character is about rather than trying to speak about it.

There should be less talk. . . . What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone's house. That says enough.

I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

I like to let the work speak rather than to have to talk about it.

I'm one of these people who would rather show you than tell you through the performance.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

There is no teaching to compare with example.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

If you don't back it up with performance and hard work, talking doesn't mean a thing.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.