Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel ‘Deliverance’ was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of ‘The Great Gatsby.’
I type most of my books for the first chapter or two – I use a manual typewriter for the first 50 pages or so – and then I move to the computer. It helps me keep the work lean so I don’t end up spending 10 pages describing a leaf.
As an actor, I like to get a bit of momentum going with a character and kind of work a bit quicker. I mean, not crazy-fast, but, you know, five or six pages a day is a nice pace.
I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.
I never walk into the studio and say, I’m going to write a song called… ‘X’ or called ‘Slow Me Down.’ I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of… I call it brain vomit. It’s kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I’m unabashedly just writing it down.
I’d like to read a book sometime. I’ve never read a book before. That’d be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I’ve got to do that sometime.
I took to saying, ‘Look, tell you what: Pick it up; open it anywhere. Read three pages. If you can put it down again, I’ll pay you a dollar. So I never lost any money on that bet, but I sold a lot of books.
When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.
If a scene is three pages long, quite often people break it up and do a page, say ‘cut’ then move on to the next bit, they do it in cuts. I don’t really like doing that; I like to go through it all in one organic run, then give notes afterward. A little bit more like theater.
More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it’s over, and that’s kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
You have to remember when we were going once a month, we were putting out issues that were 480 pages, and people were complaining that these were too big, I can’t get through a 480 page magazine every month.
As I point out in the very first pages of ‘Into the Wild,’ I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.
My sisters and I, we haven’t done much, but there are already fake social media pages for us!
I continue to meet people who have had their Web pages hijacked, their browsers corrupted, in some cases, their children exposed to inappropriate material from these dangerous programs hidden in their family computers.
It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words – of the ideas more than the language.
I can tell very early on, reading a script, within six or seven pages, whether I’m looking at real people, and whether I can see and hear real people.
Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.
I’m well-traveled. I’ve had to get a few passports because I ran out of pages.
Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.
I thought ‘UnSouled’ would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy – although we’re not calling it that.
I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.
Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible.
Whether I’m reading a national publication or one of my local Chicago newspapers, I don’t need to turn too many pages before I stumble upon another scandal. Not only do ethics violations deteriorate the public trust, but they also disrupt and undermine legitimate debate and policy.
If I’ve written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It’s like I need eight hours to do two hours’ work.
‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I’ve heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
I get tired of stories that keep going and going and never get anywhere. It’s like a promise that’s never fulfilled. Stories need endings. Otherwise, they aren’t really stories. Just pages.
The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it’s like retiring.
Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.
I wish I could fill every young man who reads these pages with an utter dread and horror of poverty. I wish I could make you so feel its shame, its constraint, its bitterness that you would make vows against it.
A woman at a bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., put Castle Freeman Jr.’s novel ‘Go With Me’ in my hand, and I took it to be nice. ‘Yeah I’ll probably read five pages,’ I thought. But once I started, I could not put it down.
To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages.’ You know, ‘I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.’ I thought, ‘I should write a character like that.’
The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ‘stick’ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
When I write, I see the pages in my head, not the words.
The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.
I’m not one of those shoppers where I go to a store and I’m like, trying it on, I’m not sure, ‘Oh, can you put this on hold?’ No. It’s either love it or hate it. And it’s the same way with scripts. I usually know within the first 10 pages. If I don’t latch into it by then, then it’s not going to happen.
Today, I believe everybody’s their own brand, and everybody has their own brand and they curate their own brand on their Facebook and Twitter pages.
I can’t just react on the strength of an email and three pages of synopsis, and say I’m going to take off for three months of my life.
One of the things that I have learned since trying to bring in an interesting story in under 28 pages is that we already agree on great chunks of typical superhero stories.
I feel like it’s such an exercise in, like, several things to read a ton of ‘Cosmo’s or ‘Glamour’s or whatever, all at once. Because you start realizing how they’re just talking about nothing for many pages, and they sort of lull you into this hypnotic state.
When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.
Gail didn’t want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times’ enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with each other.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs’ Home of books.
Louie and Seabiscuit were both Californians and both on the sports pages in the 1930s. I was fascinated. When I learned about his World War II experiences, I thought, ‘If this guy is still alive, I want to meet him.’
I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again.
I was so naive in radio technique that I knew nothing about timing. I would write pages on Honus Wagner and then get only half through by the time the show ended. I eventually learned, but there was nobody there to school me.
My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They’re thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, ‘We’re 20 pages in, something better blow up,’ we’re in trouble.
