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Who really said it

If you build it, they will come

Not quite — the actual line is “If you build it, he will come” W. P. Kinsella 1935–2016 · Canadian novelist & short-story writer
Disputed on the wording, not the source. Nobody is falsely credited here — the film is real and it does say a version of this line. Two things drifted: the pronoun (“they” for “he”), and the credit (the film borrowed the line rather than coining it). In copyright

The film is Field of Dreams (1989), and the whispered instruction is “If you build it, he will come” — singular, meaning one specific man. But the line is not the film’s invention: W. P. Kinsella wrote it in his short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” (1980) and its expansion, the novel Shoeless Joe (1982); Phil Alden Robinson’s screenplay carried it to the screen unchanged.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“If you build it, he will come” W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982); spoken in Field of Dreams (1989). Commonly misquoted as "If you build it, they will come."

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of W. P. Kinsella and Houghton Mifflin (the 1980 story and 1982 novel); Universal Pictures (the 1989 film)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of W. P. Kinsella — Canadian novelist & short-story writer. Theme: "If you build it, they will come". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you build it, they will come". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

What was actually said

Popularised by
Field of Dreams (1989)
Line first published in
“Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” (1980), expanded into the novel Shoeless Joe (1982) — both by W. P. Kinsella
Screenplay
Phil Alden Robinson (written and directed) — adapted the line verbatim; did not write it
Spoken by
“The Voice” — an unseen speaker whose performer has never been confirmed; repeated at the climax by Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), both fictional characters. Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) only hears it.

“If you build it —” [gestures toward the catcher, who is Ray’s father, John Kinsella] “— he will come.” he, not they

Shoeless Joe’s delivery at the climax, per Wikiquote’s transcription ↗. The gesture is the reveal: the “he” was never Shoeless Joe — it was Ray’s father. Earlier in the film the same seven words arrive as a disembodied whisper in the cornfield.

Field of Dreams on Wikiquote

How we verified this

  • The film, transcribed. Read as raw wikitext rather than a summary, Wikiquote’s Field of Dreams page ↗ gives the line three times as “If you build it, he will come” — and renders Shoeless Joe’s climactic version with he italicised for stress. The plural never appears.
  • The canon agrees. The AFI 100 Movie Quotes list ↗ ranks it #39 as “If you build it, he will come,” credited to Shoeless Joe Jackson / Ray Liotta (voice), and footnotes it as “Often misquoted as ‘If you build it, they will come.’”
  • But the film didn’t write it. Kirkus’s review ↗ of Kinsella’s 1980 collection Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa states that in the title story “a baseball announcer’s voice very clearly says to the narrator, ‘If you build it, he will come’” — nine years before the film. Wikipedia ↗ confirms the 1982 novel “was expanded from” that story.
  • Pinned to a page. Scholarship in Writing the Body in Motion ↗ quotes “Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice that says ‘If you build it, he will come’” and cites it to (Kinsella 1982, 3) — the novel’s opening pages.
In copyright

Firmly attributed and still fully protected — the two are separate questions. The wording was first published in 1980 and again in the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe (Houghton Mifflin), and appears in Field of Dreams (Universal Pictures, 1989); US copyright reaches works published through 1930 only, so nothing here is close to the public domain. Note that the line’s copyright originates with Kinsella’s books rather than as studio work-for-hire, since the screenplay borrowed it rather than coining it.

Fact-check

Two errors, not one

This quote is wrong twice over. The famous wording was never spoken, and the work everyone credits didn’t write it.

“If you build it, they will come” Never said

The pronoun is singular in every source. Wikiquote’s transcription ↗ gives “If you build it, he will come,” and the AFI quotes list ↗ records the line at #39 with an explicit footnote that it is “Often misquoted as ‘If you build it, they will come.’” The plural version appears nowhere in the film.

Field of Dreams (1989) / Phil Alden Robinson Borrowed, not coined

Robinson wrote and directed the film, but not this sentence. Kirkus’s review ↗ of Kinsella’s 1980 collection records that in the title story “a baseball announcer’s voice very clearly says to the narrator, ‘If you build it, he will come.’” The film reproduced it without changing a word.

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) — or Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) Wrong mouth

Ray hears the line; he never says it. Wikipedia notes the Voice’s performer “has remained unconfirmed since the film’s release.” Terence Mann is likely the source of the confusion — Collider ↗ observes that Mann insists “people will come,” a plural prophecy the public appears to have grafted onto the Voice’s singular one.

The words are “If you build it, he will come” — and they belong to novelist W. P. Kinsella, who published them in 1980 and again in 1982 ↗, before any camera rolled.

Context

How a singular “he” became a plural business cliché

In the film, the pronoun is the whole point. “He” is one man — and the story’s final turn reveals that the man was never Shoeless Joe Jackson at all, but Ray’s estranged father. Wikiquote’s transcription preserves the moment Shoeless Joe restores the stress: “If you build it —” [gestures toward the catcher, who is Ray’s father] “— he will come.” The line is an intimate promise about one ghost, one reconciliation.

The misquote converts that promise into a crowd. “They will come” is now boilerplate for product launches, stadium subsidies and highway budgets — a claim that supply summons demand. That reading isn’t drawn from thin air: as Collider notes ↗, Terence Mann’s mid-film speech insists that “people will come,” and he is proven right. The public seems to have fused Mann’s plural prophecy onto the Voice’s singular one. The irony is that the misquote is the version people actually mean — which is precisely why it won.

“He” is a father. “They” is a customer base. The drift of one pronoun swapped a ghost story for a business plan.

A note on who said it, and who wrote it

The speaker is not the author. Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hears the line; he doesn’t coin it. The disembodied Voice’s performer has never been confirmed — Wikipedia records that the actor’s identity “has remained unconfirmed since the film’s release,” and that Kinsella himself said he was told it was Ed Harris. AFI credits the quote to Shoeless Joe Jackson, voiced by Ray Liotta, who delivers it at the climax.

The writer is not the screenwriter, either. Phil Alden Robinson wrote and directed the film, and his adaptation earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay — but this particular sentence arrived already finished. Unlike Gone with the Wind, where the film sharpened Mitchell’s prose by one word, Field of Dreams changed nothing at all. The seven words are Kinsella’s, published nine years before the film opened.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Field of Dreams — film transcriptionen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced transcription of the film. Gives the line as “If you build it, he will come,” and preserves Shoeless Joe’s climactic delivery with the emphasis on he.
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes (list)en.wikipedia.org

Ranks the line #39 as “If you build it, he will come,” credited to Shoeless Joe Jackson / Ray Liotta (voice), with a footnote: “Often misquoted as ‘If you build it, they will come.’”
Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa — reviewkirkusreviews.com

Reviews Kinsella’s short-story collection and quotes the title story’s voice saying the line verbatim — the key evidence that it predates the film.
Shoeless Joe (novel)en.wikipedia.org

The 1982 Houghton Mifflin novel the film adapts, “expanded from Kinsella’s short story ‘Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa’, first published in his 1980 collection of the same name.”
W. P. Kinsellaen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the line’s actual author (1935–2016), including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship won by Shoeless Joe.
Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe — scholarshipread.aupress.ca

Academic chapter quoting the line with a page-level citation to the novel — “(Kinsella 1982, 3)” — and tracing the novel back to the short story.

The novelist, not the screenwriter

Who actually wrote the line

W. P. Kinsella

1935–2016 · Canadian novelist & short-story writer

William Patrick Kinsella (1935–2016) was a Canadian novelist and short-story writer who developed his baseball fiction while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut novel Shoeless Joe (1982) — expanded from his 1980 short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” — won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. He wrote the sentence the world now quotes; the 1989 film adaptation made it famous and, in doing so, quietly took the credit.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982, 3. Line first published in “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” in the 1980 collection of the same name; carried verbatim into Field of Dreams, written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (Universal Pictures, 1989).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you build it, they will come’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-build-it-they-will-come

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