Dialogue Quotes - Page 20

• 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.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Real, Writing, Would Be

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Character, Unique

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Character, Mean

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Character, Fighting

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.41, Random House

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• Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Character, Writing, Mistress

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• On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

  John Fowles

  Writing, Doubt, Mind

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• As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

  Stephen King

  Honesty, Writing, Keys

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.184, Simon and Schuster

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• Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Drama, Writing, Character

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• Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Character, Thinking

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• A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.

  Sol Stein

  Writing, Few Words, Emotion

  Sol Stein (2014). “Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies”, p.113, St. Martin's Press

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• Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.

  Sol Stein

  Writing, Action, Tough

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• Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.

  Sol Stein

  Mistake, Writing, Beginners

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

  John Steinbeck

  Writing, Want, Way

  John Steinbeck (1990). “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters”, p.164, Penguin

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• In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Speech, Tests

  William Strunk Jr., E.B. White (1962). “the Elements of Style”

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• I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Character, Writing, Hands

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• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

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• Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion.

  John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

  Plato, Teaching, Writing

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• We need some clergy with some backbone, who don't mind making uncomfortable at times those who are very comfortable, and challenging them at the core of their faith, at least causing them to pause and to have dialogue and to be open for further discussion.

  Tim McDonald

  Challenges, Mind, Needs

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• I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I'm not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.

  Orson Scott Card

  Religion, Hungry, Lord

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• I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times... Man is a dialogue between nature and God. On other planets this dialogue will doubtless be of a higher and profounder character. What is lacking is Self-Knowledge. After that the rest will follow.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Character, Men, Self

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• For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument Kyoto Protocol of global governance,"..."By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace.

  Jacques Chirac

  Kyoto Protocol, Humanity, Acting

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• Help does not mean to intervene. I will not meddle if I am not invited to do so. But if I can serve as a go-between with my experience, I will support the government's call for dialogue with the rebel forces who also have their problems, who also have their fears. I think all us Latin Americans have to help.

  Jose Mujica

  Powerful, Latin, Humble

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• We live in a society in which it seems that every space, every moment must be 'filled' with initiatives, activity, sound; often there is not even time to listen and dialogue... Let us not be afraid to be silent outside and inside ourselves, so that we are able not only to perceive God's voice, but also the voice of the person next to us, the voices of others.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Faith, Inspiration, Voice

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• Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Communication, Two, People

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• We all say in our own lives that money isn't everything. Love matters, friendships matter. My relationship with my kids matters. It shouldn't be a giant leap to take that thought and introduce it into political dialogue

  David Cameron

  Love, Friendship, Relationship

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