dialogue dynamics Quotes

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

There is a way between voice and presence, where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens; with wandering talk it closes.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.

Talk shows are proof that conversation is dead.

I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

You can give words, but you can't take them. And when words are given, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

The script is your map of the world, isn't it? And if someone knows that if it's well-written, you get all of the beats, it will tell you everything you need to know.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

I knew that we had an obligation and that was to keep an energy in it and try to keep the audience interested. In fact, I asked some of the actors to take a look at His Girl Friday, a Howard Hawks film with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, because they talk over each other and there's a great energy.

You change the rhythm of the talk and respoonse and you change the rhythm between the talk and the response.

I look for the essence of a story and a human angle that I think audiences can relate to. I also look at how the dialogues flow in the film as a whole and between the characters, and most importantly I always consider what I can bring to the character from a creative point of view.

Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.

There are going to be people doing the talking and people who get talked about, choose, which one do you want to be?