Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it’s badly translated, hard to figure out.
I’m often forced to draw a lot of tiny panels due to the limited number of pages and the complexity of the story.
I was the one who took football off the back pages and put it on to page one.
I don’t write a play from beginning to end. I don’t write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It’s not all in ether. It’s on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what’s missing, and that’s my first draft.
TV is obviously so different from film: because it’s a never-ending process, it keeps going; you keep receiving new pages.
Homer’s whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
I would love to be in the pages of Vogue.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.
I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
I don’t look at ‘Vogue’ to ask what I’m going to wear. Because it’s something on a body too young. I have to look at the social pages to see women my age. To see how Amanda Burden is dressed and say, ‘Hmmm. Maybe I should try that.’
Nothing’s harder than writing. There’s no comparison. With directing, you can bounce a lot of ideas around. There’s tremendous support – you’ve got editors and sound mixers. With writing, it’s all you, and it’s just crippling when people tear up your pages.
I’m not such an artist type that I can’t handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don’t talk about art.
There is nothing better than a really cool mystery: you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you keep turning those pages or watching that series.
I was doing some research on menstruation for a column. I read about Arunachalam Muruganantham’s life and work, and his story gripped me, and that is when I sat down, wrote the first few pages, and sent them off to my editor to have a look.
My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot.
My books, I will say one thing – they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.
I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I’m not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.
I don’t write from dreams because I don’t remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.
Toni Collette has been a huge influence. She was my absolute number one idol, and then I got ‘United States of Tara.’ I was pinching myself. I couldn’t believe the first day I was on set, and I got pages of dialogue of real stuff to do with her.
When I was growing up, ‘Ebony Magazine’ was a must read in our household. In those pages I found our news, our stories, and my pride.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.
When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.
It is difficult sharing and capturing so many years of memories and the people behind the words-and even though that guest book can speak volumes, in between, the pages remain so silent.
You may look at the people who sell the pages of the tabloids, and they’re more famous for their personal exploits. I know all about these people, but when was the last time I saw something they’ve done or bought an album?
When I start a book, I write a minimum of five pages every day, except weekends. If I’m going on a ski trip, I take my computer with me, get up at six, do my five pages, and then go skiing.
Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn’t going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book.
I am an urban vegan. I love the glossy pages of ‘Vogue,’ even though I won’t purchase the leather shoes and bags I see there, and being reminded that the fur trade even exists breaks my heart.
I love chapbooks. They’re in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can’t sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
Ever since I did that 57.9 last year, the Americans have been analysing me in detail. You can see on the swimming web pages. They are breaking it down in every detail. How many strokes I take. How quick I am in and out of the wall.
Gym traumaramas can happen to anyone. One time, I brought a packet of papers to read while jogging on the treadmill. Right when I was in the middle of my run, I dropped them and they flew everywhere! Pages went flying all over the place and got in the way of other people working out.
The first pages of any book I remember reading, in Pinner Wood primary school, were from The Beacon Readers: stories of Farmer Giles, Rover the Dog, Old Lob the shepherd and Mrs Cuddy the Cow. I was very fond of Mrs Cuddy.
The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.
I was getting a lot of editorial, as in lots of pages in ‘Vogue,’ but it’s far more important to get your dresses on the back of a famous person. Charlotte Rampling in Bruce Oldfield. That sells.
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, ‘Concerning the Nature of Things.’
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public – not while he was alive, at any rate.
Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it’s all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I’m completely in love with CGI. It’s great for conveying a cartoonist’s sense of reality.
Even before my audition, there were several pages missing from my script because those bits were so unbelievably secret not even I was allowed to see them.
And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He’s an accountant from Chicago, doesn’t know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.
The mail amazes me. I sometimes get these letters that are ten pages, and handwritten, from women pouring their hearts out and, for security reasons, I can only respond with a headshot and ‘Dear so and so, be good. WM.’ It never feels like enough.
Editorial pages all say, ‘Well, the other guy has a point, too. It remains to be seen how this will come out. We certainly hope it comes out fine; blah, blah.’ Cartoonists don’t go that way. Our job is to stick out our tongues, to show a big raspberry to whatever pompous jerk happens to be mouthing off.
At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you’d crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.
There’s great value to knitting or digging up your garden or chopping up vegetables for soup, because you’re taking some time away from turning the pages, answering your emails, talking to people on the phone, and you’re letting your brain process whatever is stuck up in there.
We have a tax code whose complications and levels of unfairness and levels of choosing people to give tax breaks to and choosing people to deny them to is thousands of pages long with endless complications and unbelievable manipulations by everybody.
A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, ‘Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.’
