I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.
To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing. At the same time, it's fun to just stay on your toes and let the next bit of dialogue come in, and turn the page as you read the next script and see what they have in stor...
I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I'm important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.
Before I write the first page of a novel, I spend a long time creating detailed backgrounds for my characters. I imagine the experiences that have formed them, what makes them happy, angry, fearful, and what they yearn for.
We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.
Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it's always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it's not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.
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.
Roger Thornhill: Jack Philips, manager for Kingby Electronics. Eve Kendall: No, you're not, you're Roger Thornhill of Madison Avenue, and you're wanted for murder on every front page in America. Don't be modest.
Cecil Parkes: The page! For God's sake, the notes! Peter Helfgott: I'm sorry sir, I keep forgetting the notes. Cecil Parkes: Will it be asking too much to learn them first?
My background is in tech. I studied computer science, and was working on TechTV, so the first thing I wanted to do was see my favorite motherboard stories hit the front page; you know, like, really geeky stuff.
I'm always looking for a cover subject that reflects the magazine, an interest in fashion, in culture, in society. We're trying to bring the world into the pages of 'Vogue.' We do that by tapping into the zeitgeists with our cover subjects.
It's things like Wikipedia that help us to advance as a society and help us to accelerate our evolution. If you're a researcher and you need some answer to something, and in today's world you can find it this quickly, it allows you to develop whateve...
We don't look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally. We look at them through the guts. We look at them as if we're doing a high school problem, like what is beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don't go and think about ...
They read their sports pages, know their statistics and either root like hell or boo our butts off. I love it. Give me vocal fans, pro or con, over the tourist types who show up in Houston or Montreal and just sit there.
The craziest thing I've done getting over love is skydiving. I had a really upsetting breakup. When I broke up with my boyfriend I needed to like do something different and so I actually went skydiving to turn over a new page.
There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning.
I am up at 3:30, reading the op-ed pages and getting ready to be on the air by 6 A.M. on the set of 'Morning Joe,' and after three hours of TV and two hours on the radio, it is only 12 noon.
Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It's disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there's something visceral about opening a letter - I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.
If I go into a relationship with an artist, which at most is going to last five years, we have a 100-page contract covering every eventuality. Whereas with marriage you go into it with no contract, with laws that date back hundreds of years, and I do...
I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'
