Michelle Dean Quotes

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!

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

In a normal movie, you'd never see one guy talk for an entire page, whether good or bad.

I like stories, and I really like words. So I like stories that rely on dialogue.

The film industry is mostly about unidimensional characters.

It does not matter to me how many dialogues I have in the film or the screen time. It is all about story and characters for me.

What drew me into making movies is trying to make characters that step off the screen.

By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.

I am most proud of the development of the characters as personalities that game players could relate to and care about.

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

'Fanboys' was the first real screenplay that I ever wrote that was an original story with my own characters.

Over the years, if you look at the films of people like Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, their supporting characters, even if it's a doorman with two lines, always seem three-dimensional. To me, that's a sign of good storytelling.

Everything starts with what's on the page, what a writer has come up with. And whether it is a big studio film or independent film, is the story being well told? Is it interesting? Is the character interesting? And is there something about the character that may stretch me?

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there's this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

I think I try to look at all my films and break them down because, at the end of the day, it's about creating characters that you like.

I am very sensitive about characters being annoying in movies.

Coming up in the School of Aaron Sorkin Delivery of Fast-Paced Dialogue and Hyper-Articulateness prepared me well for Shondaland, where there are many of the same factors at play.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

Most of my films have been very character driven.