Assuming that you convey enough emotion through description and action, said should be all you ever need. Assuming you even need it at all.

Matt, Is “said” really so bad?

…it’s easier to squeeze a melon through the eye of a needle than it is to get a UK publisher to think in other than Gutenberg terms.

Sir Terry Pratchett on UK publishers

Sir Terry Pratchett apparently said this about UK publishers unwillingness to embrace anything invented after the sixteenth century. We found it on the Internet so “it must be true”.

Sometimes the things you’re convinced you don’t want turn out to be the thing you need the most in this world.

Malorie Blackman, Boys Don’t Cry

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.

Beatrix Potter

Leave wasn’t an alternate economic or political model. It was a blank canvas which people could project their hopes, aspirations and frustrations onto. This was the only way you could get voters from the shires to vote with those from post-industrial towns in the north. It was a fantasy land of universal expectation.

Ian Dunt, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: Everything You Need to Know about Britain’s Divorce from Europe