Quotes on Pages

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.

The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.

I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.