Love Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Jessica Hagedorn’s line reads like a craft confession, but it also doubles as a quiet declaration of allegiance: she’s not trying to write “literary” in the museum-glass sense. She’s chasing immediacy. “I love writing dialogue” puts voice and friction up front, the place where character is exposed in real time, where power dynamics show themselves without the author hovering to explain them. Dialogue is also portable across forms; it’s how a playwright thinks, but it’s equally how a novelist builds scenes that can survive adaptation, performance, or the collective memory of a room.

The second clause sharpens the intent: “visual and very cinematic” signals a commitment to image, movement, and cuts. “Cinematic” isn’t just shorthand for pretty description. It implies pacing, montage, jump cuts, and the way meaning can be assembled through juxtaposition rather than exposition. It hints at an audience trained by film and TV to read subtext in gestures, silences, and framing. Hagedorn is acknowledging that modern storytelling competes with cameras; instead of resisting, she drafts prose and theater that borrow the camera’s grammar.

Context matters: Hagedorn’s work is famously hybrid, mixing pop culture, politics, and diaspora experience. A cinematic approach lets her stage fragmentation as a feature, not a flaw: multiple voices, overlapping realities, scenes that feel like they’re spliced from different channels. The subtext is confidence, too. She’s saying: trust the scene. Trust the ear. If the dialogue lands and the images cut sharply, the theme can arrive the way it does in life - sideways, through what people do and what they refuse to say.