The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.
Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn’t think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.
I love jazz and blues, where there’s a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.
What’s on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it’s easy.
What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.
One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.
I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‘Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.’
Sometimes the characters develop almost without your knowing it. You find them doing things you hadn’t planned on, and then I have to go back to page 42 and fix things. I’m not recommending it as a way to write. It’s very sloppy, but it works for me.
When good news about the market hits the front page of the New York Times, sell.
I’ve always loved the wild rumpus in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, because the words disappear, the pictures take up the whole page, and we move forward in the story by turning the pages.
We have a tendency to assume or believe saying I love you means we are ready for love, or that hearing it from someone else means they are ready. We just assume that we are on the same page about what it means. We don’t know what someone else is thinking, projecting, assuming, expecting when they say that.
From the day Facebook launched in 2004, the profile was the most critical page on the site.
Teams that consistently perform at the highest levels are able to come together and be unified across the organization – staff, players, coaches, management, and ownership. When everyone is on the same page, trust develops, and teams can grow and succeed together.
I prefer to connect with fans from the stage. Like, I don’t have a Twitter page, or anything like that. So for me, that’s what the show is about. For me – is a way to interact with fans; being up onstage and showing them, through music – which is all I really know – the best way to say thank you.
As an actor, you’re pretty much a hired gun. You are reading other people’s words off of a page and doing what they want you to do.
It is scary to write – period – for me, but once you get past the idea that it’s scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself – to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.
If I was a soldier going to war, I’d be pretty scared the night before a battle. It’s a scary thing. And I want my readers to feel that fear as they turn the page.
Not only the style, but the way in which you don’t exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred – then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash.
When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It’s brutal on my writing.
When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I’d put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn’t actually know how to write.
I don’t really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don’t know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It’s all about language, it’s all about how you apply it to the page.
Some days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more ‘political’ than today. It’s time to turn the page.
Even if you aren’t a believer, there are incredible stories in the ‘good book’ that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is – and by the way, Shakespeare’s plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.
I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett’s work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I’m always angsty when I’m working my way through a first draft.
Television has a real problem. They have no page two.
On the Native American front, we have turned a new page in the 400-year history of the interface between the American settlers of this country and the nation’s first Americans. That’s included a new relationship where the sovereignty of tribes is in fact recognized.
The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
I went along to the audition and I had one page of lines, and I didn’t think it went particularly well.
Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn’t have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can’t make a costume drama out of it. There’s no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I’m feeling.
At heart, I would have to say I’m a pantser. I fully embrace the chaos of letting the unintended happen, on life and on the page.
When I’m writing I just think there’s only the page and me and nobody else.
I grew up in New York City in the late ’70s, at a time when U.S. – China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis.
For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
There is still a lot of misinformation being spread about higher education funding arrangements under the new Act. The students page on my website sets out the main points in the Act.
I absolutely loved Tina Fey’s ‘Bossypants’ and didn’t want it to end. It’s hilarious as well as important. Not only did I laugh on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy.
The first time I read a crime novel – I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book – it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn’t used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.
Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there’s a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.
I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I’m like, ‘What do you mean he’s dead?’ We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.
I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don’t always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It’s not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.
My whole thing is, I’ve got to be as good, as courageous as what’s written on the page.
I’m not worried. I’m just so grateful to be in the position that I’m in. I’m just going with the flow right now, and I think my album will come together quite nicely because I think everybody is on the same page.
I was in Sweden for 10 days. They put me on the front page of the daily papers eight days in a row. I did nothing to warrant any of the attention. It was ridiculous.
I revise obsessively. It’s important to me to have a clean page.
I have a lady, she’s a great lady. I love her a lot, she loves me. We’re on the same page. Whenever that day happens when we’re not on the same page we’ll move forward with it. We’re interested in having our lives be our lives right now and not a third person’s vis-a-vis marriage and whatever that means.
