Top 100 Dialogue Writing Quotes
#1. My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood.
Rani Mukerji
#2. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#3. Don't go overboard in avoiding "said." Basically, "said" is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; it's an invisible word that doesn't draw attention to itself.
Diana Gabaldon
#4. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd. I didn't have a ton of academic skills. It wasn't until I was in high school that I was like, "I guess I like writing dialogue." So that's how I got into it.
Mindy Kaling
#5. A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.
Sol Stein
#6. Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.
Tom Clancy
#7. In order to start our mythic journey to end our suffering, we need to enter into a real and dynamic dialogue with our hearts. Start by writing a letter to your heart, telling it all that's going on with you now and asking it for guidance.
Carolyn Elliott
#8. Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
Howard Mittelmark
#9. Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
Ernest Hemingway,
#10. The music I was writing for 'Hamlet' needed to be very simple because there was so much going on with the dialogue in that play, so I felt like the music had to complement that - so that carried on through; I was working on the soundtrack and the album simultaneously.
Sarah Blasko
#11. I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
Jonathan Levine
#12. I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.
Zach Braff
#13. Heart-to-heart journaling is a dialogue with God where both you and God are talking and you are recording it on paper. Heart-to-heart journaling is simply writing out your thoughts to God and what you sense to be His answer or response to you.
Linda Boone
#14. Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while
Warren Spector
#15. I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.
David Benioff
#16. [A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
#17. It's not enough simply to record the way people actually talk. The dialogue must be concentrated, shaped, dramatically moving, in a way that real-life conversation seldom is.
Philip Gerard
#18. Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.
Jeff VanderMeer
#19. Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts.
Sol Stein
#20. In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
Maria Semple
#21. When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.
Sam Shepard
#22. I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic.
George Lucas
#23. This continuous monologue that seeks to become a dialogue... (Zoltan Galos)
Z.J. Galos
#24. Sometimes, what's not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.
Joel Edgerton
#25. I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?
George R R Martin
#26. Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
#27. As actors, we were fighting that tooth and nail because of fear, because language is a crutch and dialogue is a crutch, and it's so easy to just have a great writer write you a line.
Charlize Theron
#28. In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.
E.B. White
#29. When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.
Catherine Brady
#30. I have difficulty putting words in peoples' mouths. The best dialogue is very, very thin dialogue; you let people improvise and then basically you record what they've improvised and then write it down.
Steve McQueen
#31. Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
#32. Nothing is easy in writing. I don't think for anyone. But dialogue is probably what comes most naturally to me.
David Bezmozgis
#33. Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.
Edith Wharton
#34. What's great about writing a screenplay is that the subtext of the scene, what is not said, can sometimes be more important that what is said. Again, dialogue serves two basic functions in the scene: Either it moves the story forward or it reveals information about the character.
Syd Field
#35. Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.
Judy Blume
#36. In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.
Don DeLillo
#37. For all forms, writing dialogue is almost like writing music. I pay close attention to rhythms and tones.
Sefi Atta
#38. Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.
Will Shetterly
#39. Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.
Pete Docter
#40. There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It's always heartbreaking.
Ethan Hawke
#41. To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive.
Sol Stein
#42. He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue.
George Lucas
#43. As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.
Henning Mankell
#44. All the information you need can be given in dialogue.
Elmore Leonard
#45. New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
Patrice Pavis
#46. To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
Dirk Benedict
#47. Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.
Bill Ayers
#48. If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.
Ian Anderson
#49. Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
Nikki Giovanni
#50. Noah Baumbach writing is really wonderful. I think the way he plays out each character with a unique voice is really impressive, and rhythmically his dialogue works.
Naomi Watts
#51. If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.
Quentin Tarantino
#52. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#53. Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.
Sol Stein
#55. I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.
Patrick DeWitt
#56. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.
Ayn Rand
#57. I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...
John Geddes
#59. There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it.
Charlie Kaufman
#60. I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.
Zoe Kazan
#61. Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.
Sol Stein
#62. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.
Rich Sommer
#63. Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels ... tacky.
Edmund White
#64. DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
#65. If you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important.
Thomas Lennon
#66. When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.
David Bezmozgis
#67. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.
Chuck Wendig
#68. Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
Rose Tremain
#69. Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
Elizabeth Bowen
#70. Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
Eudora Welty
#71. Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
#72. I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.
Jessica Hagedorn
#73. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.
Diana Gabaldon
#74. James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.
Anne McCaffrey
#75. I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
Tom Stoppard
#76. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
Stephen King
#77. Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: 'What's important is not the emotion they're playing but the emotion they're trying to conceal.
John Yorke
#78. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
Anne Tyler
#79. In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
G. Willow Wilson
#80. I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.
Marian Keyes
#81. I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue.
Charles Soule
#82. For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!
Julia Quinn
#83. I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#84. Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
Neil Cross
#85. Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.
Stephen King
#86. You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.
Jason Aaron
#87. I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.
Kenneth Lonergan
#88. If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
David Nicholls
#89. I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it ... Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don't you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.
Elmore Leonard
#90. If you can't look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it's there - take it out or change it.
Diana Gabaldon
#91. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.
Elmore Leonard
#92. I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.
Steve Buscemi
#93. As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.
Jesse Eisenberg
#94. And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
Maria Semple
#95. Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.
Ray Bradbury
#96. All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
#97. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
Catherine Lowell
#98. Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
Elmore Leonard
#99. As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.
Diana Gabaldon
#100. When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.
Tom Ford
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