fictional dialogue Quotes

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

Movie dialogue is movie dialogue. It can sound real, but no one speaks that way.

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.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

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.