Memorable Lines
08 February 2016
It is always impressive, the ability of a line or two of dialogue to pin a reader’s interest. Ian Fleming, for example, in Goldfinger, wrote the following interchange:
James Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Auric Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
Fourteen words total, far fewer than the allowed 144 Twitter characters. Far more memorable than any words I’ve ever read on Twitter. What is it, then, that makes dialogue in a movie – and in a book – so memorable? Why is this simple interchange between the hero and the villain in a film made more than forty years ago remembered so well today?
The reason lies not only in the snappy repartee between Bond, the hero, and Goldfinger, the villain, but in the depth, the fullness, of the two characters. It’s the characters who make the dialogue come alive, not vice-versa. The interchange would have been stock, if Bond and Goldfinger had not been so fully drawn. So…how does a writer create fulsome characters like James Bond and Auric Goldfinger?
In his introduction of Goldfinger, Fleming describes a physically unattractive villain with the usual mixture of modifiers, but it is the author’s one simple sentence that brings Goldfinger to life: “It was as if Goldfinger had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.” The visual description lays the foundation of a fully-drawn villain, so when he utters the evil statement, No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!, readers understand they are in the presence of a flesh and blood character, someone they would recognize on the street.
With one descriptive sentence and one memorable utterance, Fleming created a villain whose name has become synonymous with evil. No cardboard character, Auric Goldfinger. No hack writer, Ian Fleming.
It is always impressive, the ability of a line or two of dialogue to pin a reader’s interest. Ian Fleming, for example, in Goldfinger, wrote the following interchange:
James Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Auric Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
Fourteen words total, far fewer than the allowed 144 Twitter characters. Far more memorable than any words I’ve ever read on Twitter. What is it, then, that makes dialogue in a movie – and in a book – so memorable? Why is this simple interchange between the hero and the villain in a film made more than forty years ago remembered so well today?
The reason lies not only in the snappy repartee between Bond, the hero, and Goldfinger, the villain, but in the depth, the fullness, of the two characters. It’s the characters who make the dialogue come alive, not vice-versa. The interchange would have been stock, if Bond and Goldfinger had not been so fully drawn. So…how does a writer create fulsome characters like James Bond and Auric Goldfinger?
In his introduction of Goldfinger, Fleming describes a physically unattractive villain with the usual mixture of modifiers, but it is the author’s one simple sentence that brings Goldfinger to life: “It was as if Goldfinger had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.” The visual description lays the foundation of a fully-drawn villain, so when he utters the evil statement, No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!, readers understand they are in the presence of a flesh and blood character, someone they would recognize on the street.
With one descriptive sentence and one memorable utterance, Fleming created a villain whose name has become synonymous with evil. No cardboard character, Auric Goldfinger. No hack writer, Ian Fleming.
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