Quotes About Dialogue

We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all.

One can lead with no more than a question in hand.

Working on 'Drive', a lot of fun. This is Tim Minear whom I've worked with before on 'Firefly' of course. He called me up and said, 'I've got a part for you that you will love,' and I love Tim's writing. I love his stories. I love his characters, his dialogue. He has a knack for reveals and he has a knack for moments.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

It's really important to me to follow the kinds of conversations that happen around diversity and representation and writing inclusive books.

In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.

My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'

I'm always looking, as an actor, for activities. I think it's far more interesting to watch what people do than what they say. You always want to watch behavior, because the dialogue as written by our illustrious leaders is great. Eminently playable.

Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?

As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

If a man is talking in the forest, and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

It's important to have people who are absolutely willing to say you're wrong or who have a totally different perspective than you do on everything. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, and good ones are even harder.

We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.

I think the best villains are ones that you can look at and say, 'Yeah, he's obviously going about this the wrong way or going too far or whatever, but I can see where he's coming from.' Magneto's a great example of that, and the reason he and Charles Xavier can have such great conversations is that they can both make some good points.

Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.

I've got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called 'Jayne Mansfield's Car.' I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.

As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.

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.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.