A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author. . . if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that's the whole thing.
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
Why are we deforesting for pulp and paper when we have a logical and efficient solution in plants like kenaf or bamboo? It doesn't make sense to me at all.
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.
I dove on those papers like Sherlock Holmes on a cappuccino binge.
Every new routine I have ever written and performed probably occurred extemporaneously. Then after you have fleshed it out and tried it out in front of a number of audiences and it works, you put it down on paper.
We don't ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
True luxury is being able to own your time - to be able to take a walk, sit on your porch, read the paper, not take the call, not be compelled by obligation.
When I couldn't get ahold of cigarettes, I'd roll coffee grounds into typing paper and smoke that and then vomit.
People who picnic along the public highway leaving a clutter of greasy paper and swill (not a pretty name, but neither is it a pretty object!) for other people to walk or drive past, and to make a breeding place for flies, and furnish nourishment for rats, choose a disgusting way to repay the land-owner for the liberty they took in temporarily occupying his property.
Read the editorial page of your local paper. It introduces you to opinion and can be terrifically provocative and perhaps a great motivating force for you to get involved in your community, regardless of your political ideology.
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question.
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
I am attracted to generic or 'industrial' colours; paper bag brown, file cabinet gray, industrial green, that kind of thing.
Right now, nobody legalized paper money. Where did that come from.
Use of paper has continued to soar. It is as though paper is taking its revenge on the futurists - not that any futurist has ever lost business because of a wrong prediction.
But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.