If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
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.
It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of .
Writing a screenplay needs to be more than words on a page - and by the way, I think the words on the page are something you have to try to execute on the highest level you can; I'm not dismissing that by any regard.
Alfred Pennyworth: [to Bruce] Batman may have made the front page, but Bruce Wayne got pushed to page eight. [Bruce reads the headline: "Drunken Billionaire Burns Down Home."]
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
She tried to smile sympathetically, but with her face it wasn't quite possible.
A blanket could be used as a stool softener. Or it could also be used to soften a chair.
A blanket could be used to trap my love in, before it dissipates out into the world.
Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.
A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
I just filled out my income tax forms. Who says you can't get killed by a blank?
The American people reject the idea of giving Washington a blank check to increase the debt limit.
Throughout my life, I've known that if I change my hair, if I change my look, people I know will blank me in the street.
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.
I'm half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I've very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.
I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming. They don't know I'm only using blanks.
No, I don't autograph blank slips, checks, or stickers, and certainly no books without me in them.
