How To Write Dialogue Quotes & Sayings

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book. — Rob Lowe

When I wrote my first film and then directed it and I looked at it for the first time on what's called an assembly, you look at this movie which is every scene you wrote, every line of dialogue you wrote and you want to kill yourself the minute you see it. It's like, 'How did I write something so horrible?' — Bruce Joel Rubin

Cameron Crowe can write dialogue and shoot it with warmth and humor like nobody else. — Emma McLaughlin

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

People like dialogue. Being a part of it or reading it. Me personally, I'd rather write it. — Andrea L'Artiste

Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it. — Carl Hiaasen

Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative. — Brendan I. Koerner

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

When we write memoir we are re-creating, sorting through the layer of remembering, to put form and shape to our experience through language. By borrowing from the techniques of fiction and poetry, we are able to make the events of our past come alive, creating detailed pictures of time and place and portraits of the people who have come and gone in our lives. We use scene and dialogue, challenging ourselves to recall how someone talked, what they said (or more accurately, what we remember that they said) and how we felt when moving among the people and events of our past. — Janice Gray

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

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

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

I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor. — Patrick DeWitt

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

There were definitely scenes I struggled with more than others: the car accident and the thunderstorm are two that come to mind. It's difficult to write about a thunderstorm. There are only so many ways to describe it and our vocabulary is so limited. And the car accident scene required a tense, manic quality that had to be conveyed in the language, as well as the character's dialogue and actions. I was editing these scenes long after I thought I was finished with them. — Mary J. Miller

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. — August Wilson

Structure 19. You worried about structure when you came up with your story! If you did, I'm sorry. You missed some of the most joyous moments in writing. Character and story come first. Before anything. Certainly before all that Act One, Two, and Three crapola. When you're teasing out your story, make lots of notes. Think out loud. Talk to a tape recorder. Make more notes. Fill up oceans of 3x5 cards. Write on yellow legal pads. Write on white legal pads. Scribble on napkins or beer coasters. Write down cool stuff for characters to do that may never find its way into the movie. Make notes and more notes and more notes, but do not trouble yourself with structure. Screw structure. Have fun. Structure is for later. For now, just let your incredibly creative mind run free. Make notes about character and plot and story and funny moments and locations you'd like to visit. Tape record dialogue for your — William M. Akers

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

If you keep the situations real, the characters' behavior will be real and honest, too. If they're suddenly robbing a bank and exchanging snappy dialogue, well, I wouldn't even know how to write that. — Nicole Holofcener

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue. — Ridley Scott

Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind. — Greg Dening

In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can. — David Mamet

More than 100,000 soldiers will soon return home with the post-traumatic stress I know so well, not to mention the mysterious effects of deplted uranium ... and the ripples of resentment and animosity this war has sent throughout the world will inevitably wash up on U.S. shores.
As I write this, mainstream political dialogue is still focused on the crazy idea that we can somehow still "win" the war in Iraq. For someone like me, a citizen of both countries, what outcome would constitute a victory? When you're talking about war, about so many thousands dead, so many families shattered on both sides, how can anyone claim victory? — Wafaa Bilal

For some reason, I have always had a really good ability to write children in a way that's realistic but not annoying. The key to that is underwriting them: peel back the dialogue and keep it simple. — Jeff Lemire

The way you write dialogue is the same whether you're writing for movies or TV or games. We use movie scriptwriting software to write the screenplays for our games, but naturally we have things in the script that you would never have in a movie script
different branches and optional dialogue, for example. But still, when it comes to storytelling and dialogue, they are very much the same. — Sam Lake

If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions. — Jimmy Breslin

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,

People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did. — Ann Patchett

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read — Khaled Hosseini

I find that men as high as trees will write, dialogue-wise yet no man doth them slight. For writing so: Indeed if they abuse, truth, cursed be they, and the craft they use. To that intent; but yet let truth be free, to make her salleys upon Thee, and Me. Which way it pleases God: For who knows how, Better than he that taught us first to Plough. To guide our Mind and Pens for his Design? And he makes base things usher in Divine. — John Bunyan

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place.So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form. — Billy Collins

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

Adventure games are all about details - if you happen to take this one object and use it with this other object, in a really weird place, at a weird time. If you happen to write a really funny dialogue line for that, even if it didn't solve the puzzle, people will appreciate that. — Tim Schafer

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial. — Tom Stoppard

Write a smart joke and people want to talk about it and keep the dialogue going. Also, if you can make someone laugh, it's a pronouncement that they like you on some level. — Lizz Winstead

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write. — Marsha Norman

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about. — Beyonce Knowles

Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down. — Tom Clancy

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point. — Rachel Joyce

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

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

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. — John Berendt

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue! — Matthew Specktor

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page. — Christopher Guest

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. — Aaron Sorkin

I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed. — Richard K. Morgan

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Then they started pulling me in and I was very resistant. All the other actors would be saying write more, more dialogue for me, and I'd always be saying 'No, less, less'. — Peter Berg

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,

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue! — Richard Greenberg

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things
a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring
with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine
the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. — Raymond Carver

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