We were doing a series on how to use dialogue tags over at Word Whores last week, “He Said, She Said” and while I was researching my contribution (which you can read here if you’d like), I found all these great quotes about dialogue, from actors and writers. I didn’t use any of them but I hate to let fun quotes go to waste, so here they are for your pleasure:

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
Alfred Hitchcock

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
Truman Capote

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. David Mamet

In every movie I do have a dialogue.
Jackie Chan

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn’t speak any Russian. He didn’t care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
Francis Ford Coppola

Composers dialogue – and obsessively, bitterly argue – with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Brian Ferneyhough

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: ‘We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,’ and when you ask what’s left, they say: ‘Well, the typing is very good.’
John Sayles

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.
Terri Windling

I kept the same suit for six years and the same dialogue. They just changed the title of the picture and the leading lady.
Robert Mitchum

There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don’t get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly.
Bill Forsyth

I listen to music two ways: As a person, you have an instinctive, personal, emotional response. But as a music supervisor, you have a secondary response, which is, ‘Will this sit well under dialogue?’ ‘Can people die to this?’ ‘Can people kiss to this?’
Alexandra Patsavas

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don’t, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don’t need to have all this talking.
Craig McCracken

Happy Monday!