I hope my children will grow up to love literature, but I expect they will absorb it as readily via a screen or pod as from glued quires of printed pages.
Normally, when I read a script, I read 30 pages, and then go have a cup of tea and come back. And then, I read 20 pages and go make a phone call, and then go back to it.
We don’t sit down and look at the news pages and think, ‘How could we do an episode about that?’
I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
I really do hope ‘The Hate U Give’ provides mirrors for readers who don’t often get them in books. I’ve had so many young black girls tell me just how thrilled they are to see someone who looks like them on the cover. I hope that they see themselves in the pages as well.
You know, after filming the movie the book was still just as big. I think it was actually bigger. I think Stephen King went back and wrote extra pages. He’s fantastic.
I remember when I was in graduate school and someone in workshop would say, ‘I’m going to bring in a chapter of my novel.’ The thought that someone could think they’d write a whole long thing… I could only see twelve pages ahead. But then I realized that if you could see twelve more after that, you can start.
Our goal has always been to make broadcasters on TwitchTV feel like they own their channel pages, and we’re continuing to make incremental improvements there.
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.
I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they’re convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it – excitement that life’s finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.
When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the ‘Ladies Home Journal,’ and I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back and forth.
You don’t write a book. You write a sentence and then a paragraph and then a page and then a chapter. Looking at writing 400 plus pages or seventy thousand odd words is incredibly daunting, but if you just focus on the immediate picture – say, 500 words – it’s not so overwhelming.
Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages – and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks.
I couldn’t pay attention to a novel; I’d get three pages in and couldn’t remember what it was about.
Once, I got slaughtered after ‘Blade Runner’ by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.
The thing is, you never know with any movie how it’s going to turn out. It’s always a mystery – you’ll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.
The process of doing films is not my favorite, but I love television. Television is a quicker turnaround. You shoot more during the day, which makes me feel more productive. It would be like, ‘I did five scenes today and ten pages.’ That’s television.
I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
I think Don Henley is a brilliant contemporary rock writer. He would have been a fabulous poet if he weren’t a musician. He was a literary major, and not only that – he’s gifted with a brilliant voice. To me, Don could sing the New York City Yellow Pages and I’d buy it. I just love the sound of his voice.
The ‘Fortune’ I came to work for on Jan. 25, 1954, was a monthly, with pages significantly larger than what you’re reading; ‘art’ covers that did not relate to stories inside; and a newsstand price of $1.25.
I’m always looking for a cover subject that reflects the magazine, an interest in fashion, in culture, in society. We’re trying to bring the world into the pages of ‘Vogue.’ We do that by tapping into the zeitgeists with our cover subjects.
Dybala is three pages ahead of the rest in the football manual.
Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.
I’ll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I’m ready to begin.
I don’t write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words – enjoyed doing that. He was a baddie. I did one on Churchill, which was a bestseller in New York, I’m glad to say. 50,000 words. He was a goodie.
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
The first 40-50 pages of ‘Veekai’ is what made it film-friendly. I realised the subject would be relevant even after 50 years.
If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn’t have the World Wide Web.
I never thought I’d make the pages of ‘Sports Illustrated’, because I’ve always been skinny.
There were always plenty of newspapers in the house. ‘The Times’, ‘Guardian’, ‘Daily Telegraph’ and ‘Daily Mail’ were all regular fixtures on the coffee table. I used to enjoy reading ‘The Times’ editorial pages and the ‘Daily Mail’ sports pages.
Honestly, soaps are great training. You’re doing 90-plus pages a day. It was my acting class, where I built my foundation for showing up and being professional.
I’ve learned how to sleep on airplanes. When I’m taking a trans-Atlantic flight or going to a different continent, I will always read because reading puts me to sleep. When you watch a movie, you have all that light coming to your eyes, but with reading, I can’t get through 15 or 20 pages.
Visual art and writing don’t exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can’t do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you’ve put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don’t do that now.
As adults, we’ve seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor’s attention enough for her to finish your story.
A ‘lewk’ is like, ‘I’m wearing a lewk today,’ it’s something that everybody will notice. It’s like you’re out of the pages of a magazine, that’s a lewk.
I’m so into this idea that the Internet was this reservoir of mythologies and histories, and the architecture of it being linked pages that create hard connections and bridges between ideas that shouldn’t be linked.
I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn’t know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don’t have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.
When I’m writing, I try not to think things like, ‘Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.’ Books are very long and it’s easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, ‘Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I’m going to write two pages of it. That’s all – just two pages.’
The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn’t come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
Basically, we convert the entire Web into a big equation, with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the Web pages, and billions of terms, which are the links. And we’re able to solve that equation.
My writing day has grown shorter as I’ve aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.
We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books – pages and pages on it.
‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ its pages heavy with sinners brought low and prayers groaning on the wind, scared me when I read it as a teenager.
I don’t think that anyone in the pages of ‘War on Peace’ is arguing that diplomacy is the replacement for military power. But, correctly, the job of the military is to think tactically.
Not long after I started posting the first ‘Nimona’ pages online, a literary agent reached out to me, and I ended up signing with him before I returned to school for my senior year.
