Literary Dialogue 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.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

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.

At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work... that's the reason I write.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

Overall, my books represent a kind of shared communion and meditation with my fellow human beings... The books are also a part of what I call the great continuum of spiritual literary dialogue that I feel has been in progress since human beings first gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.