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Writers are spies. Outsiders. Believers in the turning pages.
Sep 10, 2025
Books were like old friends, with their worn covers and well-thumbed pages.
A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun, It gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none.
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?
All of a sudden, those few pages of script that he had shown me with the weird images I could visualize all of that in my brain, and I knew that there was this mad little genius at work here and I really wanted to do the film.
You live for those really great scenes where you almost feel that the film has gone beyond what was printed on the script pages and been raised to another level.
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.
Could anyone fail to be depressed by a book he or she has published? Don't we always outgrow them the moment the last page has been written?
My only requirement for that first story was that there had to be a fight or an explosion on every page. Naturally, no one wanted to publish it, but I liked the character, did a few stories to keep my hand in.
I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.
A laudation in Greek is of marvellous efficacy on the title-page of a book.
I do like a song that can look good on a page without even being sung. I edit and edit and edit.
Fascism was part of the absolute evil. (...) We have to denounce the ashaming pages in the history of our past. (...) There included all the pages related to the discrimination and the persecution of jews and, more in general, of minoritires. And therefore that one [The Italian Social Republic of Salò] is also included.
It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't-I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere-but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.
There should be a period of time during each practice session when you perform. Invite some friends in to your practice room and play a passage or a page of something. ... What I'm trying to indicate is that each day should contain some amount of performing. You should engage in the deliberate act of story telling each day you practice. Don't only gather information when you practice, spend time imparting it. This is important.
The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, Concerning the Nature of Things.
I like the weight, look, and feel of a book. I enjoy turning the pages, and frequently scan the spines of my many books on the wall, each title a reminder of the stored information and creative thoughts contained therein.
Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.
I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories.
After the Democrats shoved the 2700 pages of ObamaCare down our throats - and we did find out how expensive, controlling, and coercive the legislation was - a majority of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to toss it aside as unconstitutional.
I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
I'm kind of a social person and I enjoy corresponding with people and checking out their Facebook pages. And it really doesn't take much time. Ten minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night and a little bit during the day. It's just something I really enjoy.
It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.
The choice is yours: Enjoy a delicious meal of, say, veal fantarella with grilled vegetables. Or spend a quiet hour reading David Gregory's book. You may find an altogether different sort of hunger has been sated by the final page. Brilliant in its simplicity, fearless in its presentation of the truth, Dinner with a Perfect Stranger is one invitation you'll want to RSVP.
This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.
I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.
I feel I do my best work when it's all there on the page, and I feel that the character is very vivid as I read the script and I'm not having to create stuff and trying to cobble together something. If I have to do that, then I don't entirely trust what I'm doing.
To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.
A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.
I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.
It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.
The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life….every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood…. Your job is to marshal the talent you do have and find people who believe in your work. What’s important, finally, is that you create, and that those creations define for you what matters most, that which cannot be extinguished even in the face of silence, solitude, and rejection.
This stuff they are talking here in Congress costs the people of the United States $44 a page. That's beside what it costs to ship it to the asylums where it's read.
The Bible holds up before us ideals that are within sight of the weakest and the lowliest, and yet so high that the best and the noblest are kept with their faces turned ever upward. It carries the call of the Saviour to the remotest corners of the earth; on its pages are written the assurances of the present and our hopes for the future
Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.
There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
It's April 15, tax day. The federal tax code is over 74,000 pages long. But stick with it because after page 72,000, it gets really good.
one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness — justice.
One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
The Hawley Book of the Dead had me completely spellbound from beginning to end. A storytelling virtuosa, Chrysler Szarlan has woven a wondrous, scintillating web of suspense, love, history, and magic that will keep you eagerly turning the pages late into the night. Even readers not normally drawn to the supernatural will be swept away by this book; it has everything a great adventure should have-and so much more.
Hi. My name is Debby, and I am a storyteller. I don't think of myself as an actress. I am more like a face that takes words on a page, and puts them in front of your eyes.
The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
Right now, make a list of what you admire about yourself- don't stop until you've filled a page. Sit and relish each quality and accomplishment. When you remember how much you have to be proud of, you don't need to envy others. Instead of wallowing in your jealousy, use your friends' accomplishments as inspiration to pursue the life you want.