Along with Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino is renowned as a master of writing snappy dialogue between his distinctive, idiosyncratic characters. But in Tarantino’s movies, those characters’ monologues are often just as compelling as their back-and-forth conversations.

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Tarantino’s monologues are occasionally flowery and unnecessary, like Bill comparing the Bride to Superman in lieu of an explosive showdown in Kill Bill: Volume 2, but they’re in the minority. For the most part, Tarantino’s monologues are captivating, whether a gun-toting Samuel L. Jackson is reciting from the Bible or a decorated Christopher Walken is explaining the wartime significance of a gold watch.

Like A Virgin (Reservoir Dogs)

The opening shot of Reservoir Dogs

Tarantino introduced audiences to his first lines of dialogue before he even introduced them to his first frame – and those lines are delivered by Tarantino himself, no less. Over the opening titles of Tarantino’s indie debut feature Reservoir Dogs, his minor character Mr. Brown begins to explain his unique take on the Madonna hit “Like a Virgin.”

According to Maxim, after Madonna saw the movie, she sent Tarantino a copy of her Erotica album and attached a note: “To Quentin. It’s not about d***, it’s about love. Madonna.”

What Happened To The General’s Son (The Hateful Eight)

Samuel L Jackson as Major Warren in The Hateful Eight

Tarantino’s second revisionist western, The Hateful Eight, relies entirely on dialogue, as the titular octet is trapped in a haberdashery in the middle of a blizzard. The central mysteries of the movie are buried in three hours of dialogue. Right before the coffee is poisoned at the midpoint, Major Warren – played by Samuel L. Jackson, the deliverer of many fantastic Tarantino monologues – tells Bruce Dern’s ex-Confederate General Smithers what happened on the last day of his son’s life.

It’s unclear if the story that Warren tells is true. It’s a shockingly dark turn, even for this movie. The beauty of The Hateful Eight is its ambiguity. The Lincoln letter proves Warren’s gift for lying to gain an advantage, and this story goads the General into picking up his gun, allowing Warren to shoot him dead. Then again, Warren is shown to be so callous and cold-hearted that he could easily be telling the truth about torturing Smithers’ son to death.

Lt. Aldo Raine Recruits The Basterds (Inglourious Basterds)

Aldo recruits the soldiers in Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino’s World War II epic Inglourious Basterds evolves into its own thing when Jewish American soldiers shoot Adolf Hitler in the face, but the springboard into that is Q.T.’s take on the men-on-a-mission war movie subgenre. Appropriately, this storyline begins in the movie’s second chapter with a loose recreation of the recruitment scene from The Dirty Dozen, one of the subgenre’s quintessential entries.

Lt. Aldo Raine lines up the “Basterds” and explains that he needs eight Jewish American soldiers to go behind enemy lines and collect “100 Nazi scalps.” With movie-star charisma and a pitch-perfect Southern drawl, Brad Pitt delivers this monologue beautifully.

A Roaring Rampage Of Revenge (Kill Bill: Volume 2)

Uma Thurman driving in the opening shot of Kill Bill Volume 2.

The first volume of Kill Bill opens on a black-and-white closeup of the Bride, beaten and bloodied, silently vowing revenge on her attackers before a bullet puts her in a four-year coma over the opening credits. The second volume opens with the Bride on her way to kill Bill, talking directly to the camera to recap the events of Volume 1.

Uma Thurman’s fierce delivery instantly re-immerses the audience in her quest for vengeance: “When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements referred to as a roaring rampage of revenge. I roared... I rampaged... and I got bloody satisfaction.”

Rick’s Trailer Meltdown (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood)

Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick melting down in his trailer in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

During Rick’s segments of the day-in-the-life middle act of Tarantino’s latest opus, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he shoots his scenes as the “heavy” in the pilot episode of Lancer opposite Timothy Olyphant’s James Stacy. When he starts to mess up his lines, Tarantino cuts to Rick having a meltdown in his trailer. The sequence jump-cuts through various outbursts like, “You embarrassed yourself like that in front of all those g**damn people!”

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Leonardo DiCaprio nails the duality between Rick’s tough-as-nails on-screen persona and the emotional wreck he is off-camera. This scene sheds a spotlight on all his insecurities, as he worries his colleagues won’t think he practiced his lines and regrets having eight whiskey sours the previous night instead of stopping at “three or four.”

Ezekiel 25:17 (Pulp Fiction)

Jules bears down on Brett in Pulp Fiction.

From his very first scene in Pulp Fiction discussing the differences between American and European McDonald’s, Samuel L. Jackson established himself as the perfect actor to deliver Tarantino’s dialogue. But he truly earned that title when he recited the modified version of the Bible passage Ezekiel 25:17 from the Sonny Chiba martial arts movie Karate Kiba.

Jackson delivers this monologue twice in the movie. It’s used for a cool moment early in the movie when Jules kills Brett, but he deconstructs its meaning in an equally captivating monologue during the diner stick-up at the end of the movie.

The Dinner Scene (Django Unchained)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L Jackson at the dinner table in Django Unchained

The second act of Django Unchained culminates in one of the tensest dinner scenes in movie history. When Stephen notices a look between Django and Broomhilda, he lets Calvin Candie know that they’re in cahoots. Calvin returns to the dinner table with a slave’s skull and a hammer.

He uses the racist pseudoscience of phrenology to justify slavery before threatening Broomhilda and fleecing Dr. Schultz for a much higher price to secure her freedom.

Sicilian Heritage (True Romance)

Dennis Hopper tied to a chair in True Romance

After Clarence and Alabama go on the run in True Romance, a Sicilian mobster comes looking for them. He stops by Clarence’s dad’s place to interrogate him. Knowing that he’ll die either way, Clifford teases the mobster about his Sicilian heritage.

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Christopher Walken’s near-cartoonish portrayal of an Italian mobster makes a hysterical foil for Dennis Hopper, who nails this monologue.

The “Jew Hunter” (Inglourious Basterds)

Hans Landa interrogates a farmer in Inglourious Basterds

The opening sequence of Inglourious Basterds is one of the most acclaimed and revered scenes in the Tarantino canon. Col. Hans Landa arrives at a dairy farm in search of Jewish refugees and Tarantino employs Hitchcockian bomb-under-the-table tension to establish early on that there are Jewish refugees hiding under the floorboards.

The dairy farmer knows Landa by the nickname “Jew Hunter,” and Landa explains his nickname with a sinister comparison of hawks and rats. This scene immediately earned Landa a place in the ranks of the greatest movie villains of all time.

The Gold Watch (Pulp Fiction)

Christopher Walken with the gold watch in Pulp Fiction

“The Gold Watch” segment of Pulp Fiction’s anthology-like structure begins with a prologue in which a young Butch Coolidge is visited by Christopher Walken as a Vietnam War veteran (a nod to Walken’s role in The Deer Hunter) who fought alongside his late father.

Before giving Butch his dad’s gold watch, Captain Koons tells Butch all about his father’s heroism during the war. The monologue takes a surprising turn when he explains that, when they were captured as P.O.W.s, Butch’s dad hid the watch in “the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass.”

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