I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages. . . I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.
Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything. . . Nothing happens without a reason. . . Nothing is impossible. . . (Page 180).
Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages, That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone! If Werther had been my brother, and I'd killed him, His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.
If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.
About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.
We have to hear how [Donald] Trump is the bad guy and Trump poses the problem. And it's just maddening, infuriating. I hear you. I'm totally on the same page with you.
As my editor had no desire to frighten readers with the Romanian pages, he had them translated and published the whole thing in French in 1984. It was only years later, in Romania, that I was able to publish the book as I wrote it.
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
The key to success in any kind of start up is your level of persistence. It's not so much your intellect. The Zuckerburg's, Pages and Brins, that succeed have such a level of belief in what they are doing that they will put up with the kind of crap that most people won't put up with, they are incredibly persistent and resilient.
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips. )
The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one.
When people go to a web page, the thing that they want more than anything else is instant clarity.
Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.
I read because one life isn't enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.
Look at the blank pages before you with courage. Now fill them with beauty.
No one would have the courage to walk up to a writer and ask to look at the last few pages of his manuscript, but they feel perfectly comfortable staring over an artist's shoulder while he is trying to paint.
Arms control has to have a future, or none of us does. But it doesn't necessarily have to come in big packages of 600-page treaties.
Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
I won't read a book that starts with a description of the weather. I don't read books over 300 pages, though I'll make an exception for Don Delillo.