I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an ...
We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd pick up the New York Times and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page... And then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some hired thug...
I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me...
At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously c...
Reader's Bill of Rights 1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to ...
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though,...
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think h...
I did a series in Britain years ago called 'Skins,' and I remember my little sister telling me that I had a Wikipedia page that was talking about me. But then it got deleted because on Wikipedia anyone can write stuff, right? So I think that it got s...
I once won a Grammy for an Australian version of 'Turn the Page' that another artist did; I can't remember his name. There've been covers down through the years around the world, but I did like Metallica's, because I kind of related to Metallica when...
I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor ...
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pr...
I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would ...
Mais alors, comment élargir le réseau partenarial, exploiter les synergies, réveiller les talents et les gisements de productivité ? Assurément, c’est une question importante et difficile, mais incontournable, largement explicité les pages pr...
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you cre...
When I was younger, I suppose I was interested in checking out as much about writing as I could: bad, weird, irritating, even things not-to-my-taste. Now I am less open. I will decide after a few pages if I want to stay in the world of the book, and ...
Melissa: I just wish your friends were as mature as you. Stu Price: They are mature, actually. You just have to get to know them better. Phil Wenneck: [yells from outside] Paging Dr. Faggot. Dr. Faggot! Stu Price: I should go. Melissa: That's a good ...
Debbie: The subheading reads, 'Brown and Williamson has a 500 page dossier attacking chief critic.' It quotes Richard Scruggs calling it, 'the worse kind of an organized smear campaign against a Whistleblower'. 'A closer look at the file and independ...
Gus: Del Griffith! How the hell are ya? Del: Well, I'm still a million bucks shy of bein' a millionaire. [Both laugh] Del: Gus, I'd like you to meet an old friend of mine. This is Neal Page from Chicago. Neal, this is Gus Mooney. Neal: Hi. Gus: Glad ...
[Warden Norton finds the bible in his safe after Andy escapes and finds the message Andy left for him] Andy Dufresne: Dear Warden, You were right. Salvation lay within [Norton flips through a couple of pages to find the outline of the rock hammer tha...
Evey Hammond: [V has taken her to the shrine dedicated to Valerie Page] She was real! She's beautiful. Did you know her? V: No. She wrote the letter just before she died, and I delieverd the letter to you as it had been delivered to me. Evey Hammond:...
Hedley Lamarr: Wait a minute... there might be legal precedent. Of course! Land-snatching! [grabs a law book] Hedley Lamarr: Land, land... "Land: see Snatch." [flips back several pages] Hedley Lamarr: Ah, Haley vs. United States. Haley: 7, United Sta...