Natural Speech Quotes

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.

Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

There aren't any real dumb people in my voices. It's always irritated me about Hollywood dialogue - there's so much dialogue that would just bore a Ford mechanic. This is not how people talk.

The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural.

Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

I don't like theatrical actors and actresses. I like people that talk like real human beings.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

I've done network shows. A director will call me and say, 'Do you want to do this with me?' and I'll say, 'Sure,' but I couldn't do it forever because there's no real expression. That's not how people talk.

I like to write in fairly everyday language - I've always tried to write lyrics that, if people would speak the words, it wouldn't sound like a song.

Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

I have tons of stuff that, you know, seems like it's a well-constructed sentence but it is not how people talk, it's how people write. So that's why I think it's sometimes easier for me to write for actors 'cause I know what's frustrating about, you know, sentences that come out just perfect. Well, who talks like that? And who of us don't overlap each other? Except on the radio, hopefully.

In oratory, affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn.

You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers - to save the universe!"

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

When I watch films and it becomes just about the reference and not necessarily a flow with how people naturally speak, that's when you're just saying, 'Okay, I'm trying to be cool and show off.'