Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the ...
I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. Y...
I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good st...
Because if you're trying to write and you have unlimited time, you can procrastinate an unlimited account, but if you have limited time, you rush to the page trying to get something down in the little bit of fragment of time that you have, and you ma...
Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or pos...
All the really good guitar players - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin - I love all those people. But I didn't start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mai...
I think 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a good example of a film where you have to juggle a whole lot of information to follow that story, and even if you haven't read the book, it seems to go pretty well. And that is a film where the characters...
I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head a...
It was when my children were 5, 3 and 10 months old that I just felt the desperate need to get to know God through the pages of my Bible. And as a result, I started a Bible class in my city for the primary purpose of being in it.
Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it w...
The last thing I would do to this country is to even put my personal interests about the country's interest. I have never done that in my life, and I will never do it because I, you know, I was brought up as a very patriotic Egyptian, and this is not...
I was in love with a lot of people, because I was a student of the game of comedy - Carol Burnett, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Don Rickles, Red Foxx, Moms Mabley - who gets no credit, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Kirby. I loved them...
When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy, the leash s...
I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page t...
Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself fr...
I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that's none of his business), he very sweetly says that I 'might leave a wife, but not a friend.' Nice try. Neat smear. But he shouldn't be so sure....
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.
This is our skin and nobody has the right to crumple us like a paper only to find another skin to write on, and then another, ruining people like they’re pages, like they are somehow replaceable. Because that will only leave our delicate and fragil...
Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him w...
I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.
