I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.
Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations – and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.
There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.
The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
I was in a Bible study, Henry Blackaby’s ‘Experiencing God,’ and I started to experience God as I was reading the pages of this workbook and studying scripture with some friends, and we all just searching to fill that void in our lives.
The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
My take on ‘Lucifer’ was pretty much laid down by Tom Kapinos when he wrote the original pilot script for it. I remember reading it for the first time, and I was about four or five pages in, thinking this is so funny, and I know how I would want to do this if I was going to do it.
A lot of feature films do two pages a day.
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn’t happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
I go on Wikipedia and alter pages of animals with fake facts that I’ve made up about those animals.
I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.
I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents… I try to get inside my stories.
Most people travel with a good book, but I also keep my agenda with me; I’ll flip through the pages and take a few moments to organize my life a little – I rarely get the time to do this normally.
One of the more fatuous remarks I’ve heard in recent days is that ‘My Life,’ Clinton’s autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
In daytime, they’re doing 50-60 pages a day, whereas nighttime, you do seven or eight.
And that’s how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I’m reading, I’m tweaking – putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.
I started reading G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.
I love the op-ed pages of the ‘L.A. Times,’ the ‘Washington Post’ and the ‘New York Times.’ There’s just no substitute for the people who are thinking and writing on those pages.
It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference – from ‘The Score,’ specifically – to show up in Geoff Manaugh’s ‘A Burglar’s Guide to the City.’
‘Where The Wild Things Are,’ I think I could have written on my own. When I brought Dave Eggers on, I already had 60 pages of notes. I technically could have, but I don’t think I was ready to. I needed him to be there and help me.
When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don’t remember the text – instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.
I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.
‘Ice Age’ felt like stage acting. You’d write a sequence, and sometimes you’d submit pages, but other times, I would actually perform it for the directors and producer in my office.
My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn’t budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool.
I know a lot of shows are like, ‘Here’s the pages,’ right before they start filming. I’d have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don’t have as strong a backbone as those other show writers.
I have to learn sometimes 25 pages at a time. The takes can last 20 minutes – we do big, long takes. You always hope that you get a couple of days in between so you can learn the next one because you can’t keep everything in your head at the one time.
I remember in the movies we used to do two pages a day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they’ve just kind of given up.
I’ve thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.
We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.
The script for ‘Thirteen’ is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
