Quotes & Sayings About Monologues

Two monologues do not make a dialogue. — Jeff Daly

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like. — Norman Lock

Sometimes in my class I have people come in and do monologues inspired by people they know and I always find that to be useful to do specifics about somebody and then you're actually doing a character and not doing some random old lady or something. — Amy Poehler

I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues. — Vinny Guadagnino

Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything. — Jasper Fforde

It has happened to all of us. One day, one ordinary day when we imagine we're making our routine rounds in the world with ticket stubs and tobacco shreds in our pockets, our heads full of news items, traffic noise, troublesome monologues, we suddenly realize we are already someplace else, that we are not actually where our feet have taken us.
I had long slipped away, I had melted into a color paler than pale when I stood behind the windowpane made of ice. If you are to come down to earth, or any kind of reality, you must then hold a girl, that girl, hold on to her and win her love. — Orhan Pamuk

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. — Paul Theroux

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. — Alan Alda

One plus one makes two but two monologues do not make a dialogue. Of all the traits, characteristics, attributes and habits of today's customers, the one that has serious consequences for businesses is this - today's customer does not want to be just spoken to. She wants to be engaged in a dialogue. Today's consumer expects to be part of the conversation about the product and/or service on offer. Today's customer does not want to be fed with advertisements. Collaboration is what excites today's customer. — J. N. HALM

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back. — Colson Whitehead

Acting is not as difficult as you may think. People are born natural actors
and play many parts on the stage of life. Everyone is constantly in front of an
audience - or performing monologues when alone. — Bryan Michael Stoller

My belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality. — Andre Dubus

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet. — Samantha Harvey

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish. — Rita Mae Brown

Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself. — Elena Ferrante

I don't need anyone. Because I can do every single thing that a person in a relationship can. Everything. Even zip up my own dress. You know, there are some things that are actually harder to do with two people. Such as monologues. — LIZ

Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space. — Arthur Koestler

Safety and security stifle creativity! The more I suffer the better I create. But then I create to live of it safe and secure one day! — Nathan Haddish Mogos

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. — Cate Marvin

I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn... — Anais Nin

Since the road to publication is usually so arduous, meandering and fraught with unexpected twists, writers have ample time to compose (in their heads or on fettuccini-stained restaurant napkins) dissertation-length monologues befitting that of a Shakespearean lead character, during which they describe - in complex, paragraph-long sentences - how exceedingly indebted they are to everyone they've ever met, read a book by or chatted about "Motivation" with online (in their entire lives) for the help given in the writing, acquisition, printing and distribution of their debut novels. — Marilyn Brant

I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating. — Patrick Wang

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. — John Berger

A lot of times if you want to get another agent, agents actually make you do monologues in their offices. They still do that! You've got to come up with something! — Julie Halston

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues - for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy. — Emil M. Cioran

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. — Alain De Botton

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues. — Norman Lock

It is thus not so much the transformation of reality that the reader senses as the remaking of the order and the position in which common elements of human experience occur and coalesce. The recording of simultaneous but different actions in the same narrative space, the concept of the vasos comunicantes, in which two dialogues spatially and temporally independent are interwoven into one, the running together of thought processes in the form of interior monologues and stream of consciousness, and the fragmenting or refracting of everyday occurrences-these are some of the techniques that change one level of reality into another, that help create one reality out of another, that invent a new reality and invite the reader to be part of it. — Myron I. Lichtblau

Real life has always let me down. That's why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one. — Spalding Gray

[True Detective] is an intense show, even in terms of the dialogue - there's a little rhythm to it, in particular in his monologues. I think on those days, he [Woody Harrelson] really had to stay in the zone. Because there's a certain cadence in which that character speaks and talks about life, you know? But then there are other days that he was able to be a little more loose. — Michelle Monaghan

Monologues are self-verifying and self-referencing, a world in their own right, one with its own internal logic that strengthens with reiteration. — Samantha Harvey

My brother Trev went to the Professional Performing Arts School in New York, and he used to do his monologues and stuff and rehearse in our apartment. So I used to hear him all the time doing these things over and over and over. And when I was a little girl, I used to soak up everything - like anything anyone did, I soaked it up. — Chloe Grace Moretz

I've always been in school plays and performing monologues and taking drama. Now I'm in acting classes. I do it the real way. I want to be a working actor. I would love that. I just like being on a series and having a script, and I want that to be my nine-to-five. — Vinny Guadagnino

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. — Margaret Millar

Betsy waved her hands in the air as if to disperse an unpleasant perfume. He's such a lot of bother. You're better off - theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches. — Catherynne M Valente

I had been doing summer stock every summer while I was in college. We did a showcase, like most good conservatories do - monologues and things that agents and casting directors come to see. From that I got an agent. — Randy Harrison

I started acting when I was five years old. I found it randomly, through listening to my brother study monologues. I auditorally started memorizing them for no reason, and started repeating them to anyone who would listen to me. I begged my mom to let me do whatever that meant because I couldn't put into words exactly what that meant. It just meant me happy. And then, when I was 11 years old, I realized what I was doing and I looked to my mom and said, "Can I make this for the rest of my life? I think I might want to do this forever." — Chloe Grace Moretz

One-way monologues through the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia don't have much street cred with China's Internet generation, to be honest. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.' — Kirsten Vangsness

I like to hold a monologue with women. But a dialogue with myself is more stimulating. — Karl Kraus

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. — Rebecca West

Everything we do, our entire interior monologue, is prayer. — Madeleine L'Engle

How does anyone know from moment to moment what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn't know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moment. — Robert McKee

Real victory of life lies in you being involved in more conversations and less monologues. — Ashutosh Gupta

A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues? — Arthur Schopenhauer

I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about. — Irving Stone

Our inner monologues have tremendous power over us. They can affect not only our mood, not only our physical bodies, — Panache Desai

I think a lot of people who go to drama school have this ease with the text and they all have five monologues that they know by heart, and I never had that. I've done Chekov and I've done Moliere and I've done classic stuff — Tavis Smiley

To me, it's the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don't like it when we do monologues, looking into the character. — Thomas Jane

Johnny Carson started the jokes about me and Marlin in his monologues. — Jim Fowler

The desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. p. xxxii — Eve Ensler

I had to audition as an actor, and I got so tired of doing the same monologues over and over, so I started writing my own, and then I started selling them to other actors. — Richard LaGravenese

My experience as a Jewish American has often been as a spectator of one-sided conversations, or more like monologues, about Israel, Jewish History, Jewish identity, etc. Although there are profound divisions amongst Jews on all of these topics there are not many opportunities for deep and thoughtful dialogue about them. — Jill Soloway

In Filey, you eat early to prepare for the highlight of the evening: social intercourse of a kind one thought relegated to Stanley Holloway monologues. — David Hewson

I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monologues when I was 10. I still know the whole 'To be, or not to be ... ' monologue, because I knew it when I was 10. — Constance Wu

I am the kind of person that wants to get up in front of crowds of strangers and perform monologues. To each their own. — Stephanie Beatriz

Did you call me here just to deliver this monologue? Did I need to be here? — Molly Ringle

'Nashville' songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They're monologues. — Chip Esten

The first play that I saw was 'Cyrano,' and I remember going home - I was like nine years old - and trying to learn the monologues. — Francois Arnaud

I would take plays and I would cut out all the other dialogue and make long monologues because I felt the other kids weren't taking it as seriously as I did. — Sally Field

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects. — Norman Lock

Tad socked him. Hard. Twice.
Someday the bad guys would realize monologues were a bad thing. — Vivian Arend

Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an oriental bazaar than the polite monologues of the churches. — John Ortberg Jr.

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language. — Elfriede Jelinek

Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious to the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people - he doesn't notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, show them to him, and he'd probably say, 'I know someone just like that!' Then he'd tell you about that person until your teeth hurt. His hostage-taking is passive-aggressive. — Anne Lamott

There's, you know, there's an ideology behind Ultron that makes him more unique that just a bad guy. He doesn't wanna just kill the Avengers. He doesn't wanna just destroy the world. He has these monologues and these beautiful speeches that kind of embody a certain mentality about what's wrong with humanity. — Chris Evans

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile. — Andrew Sullivan

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent. — Ishmael Beah

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me. — Billy Collins

So anyway, I've learned a lot about myself just in terms of acting but just work ethic and interesting things like full-page monologues or talking straight into camera, which I had never gotten to do before. — Emma Stone

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction. — David Nicholls

You are the partner of her loneliness, the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. - ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL — Clive James

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that. — Jeanette Winterson

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Well people love to go dirty and stuff like that. It's funny, because even really dirty things can kind of inspire, but all things inspire really dirty improv and monologues. So then really dirty things can inspire the exact opposite. It's kind of a crapshoot. — Amy Poehler

They're not gong to give Hateful Eight its credit now, they'll give it its credit later. Hateful Eight was too long. I think we've indulged Quentin [Tarantino] so much with his monologues. Quentin has this very strong cult following around him and his projects, and people are always expecting so much from him; — Bun B.

Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes. — Richard Hornby

If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way — Eve Ensler

I went to the University/Resident Theatre Association auditions. Deans come and watch you in this theater. You have three minutes, and you have to do two contrasting monologues - at that time, this is 2003 - one classical and one contemporary. — Kunal Nayyar

He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this "hideous" dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a "rehearsal" of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I wrote my own play, 'The Westie Monologues,' about where I'm from in Australia, and it was very successful. From that, I started getting offers from television. — Rebel Wilson

'The Practice' I was on for seven years and it was a law show, so I really - a lot of objections and things like that, lots of long, long monologues that David Kelly used to write me, which were great. I was really lucky to have my first show go that long. — Kelli Williams