Dialogue Authenticity Quotes

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

Listen to the way people talk. If your characters sound real the rest is easy.

When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.

I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.

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.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

One of the reasons that the African American actors wanted to be a part of the show was because these people are talking to each other the way that African American people talk to each other, and they said that they didn't see that on TV.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Sometimes you have to think about what you're going to say, in real life, so when you see that thought process going on in a movie, it feels real and looks real.

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.

As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural. A lot of the time, as an actor, you don't have the freedom to change what your lines are, and they can often be very unnatural or difficult to portray in a real light.

I just don't like filming scenes where it's like, that's not how people talk. People aren't saying a joke every five seconds.

With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.

If you think about portraying Americans, for example, in a Russian film, it all depends on where the American is from, if they went to school or not, and if they're well-educated or not. Is it an American from Texas, or an American from Brooklyn? Things would change with the vocabulary and the accent.

I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.

If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.

From the very beginning, I always tried to make dialogue flow comfortably; I always did that to make it seem more authentic.

My interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable. My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience - how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us.

When you people have a set up joke and the joke is set up straight and the words are just well written, I always say "C'mon, humans don't speak that way."

The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.