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Silent pictures show us how we lived and what our attitudes were. And as an art form, they can be wonderfully entertaining and often inspirational.

Now, what does an actor who can't talk do? Wait for silent pictures to come back?

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

It would have been more comfortable to remain silent.

The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies, almost nobody was doing the same for the silents. Now there are plenty of very good historians and restorers.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

I don't know how much influence we really had, because we never put our pictures on the albums or anything and we never really promoted the Talking Heads connection, because we wanted to keep it separate from Talking Heads.

Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.

I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures.

I love some films with very silent characters, people who don't speak, but I wouldn't be able to do that.