Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Normally, when I read a script, I read 30 pages, and then go have a cup of tea and come back. And then, I read 20 pages and go make a phone call, and then go back to it.
I suppose the reason why I like acting is because I'm curious about human nature, and the less I know about a character on the page, instinctively, in a way, the better.
The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.
Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it's badly translated, hard to figure out.
I have come to accept that if I have a new haircut it is front page news. But having a picture of my foot on the front page of a national newspaper is a bit exceptional.
I'd like to read a book sometime. I've never read a book before. That'd be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I've got to do that sometime.
Working on a soap opera is such good training for the novice actor. No rehearsal, 120 pages of dialogue per week, and one take to get the scene right. No room for error.
Absolutely no bedwetting liberals or race warlords were harmed or mistreated in the creation of this web page - though the temptation was certainly very tough to resist.
I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.
All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page.
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.
The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on.
I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'
The thing is, you never know with any movie how it's going to turn out. It's always a mystery - you'll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.
'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.
I was studying American politicians who were searching - allegedly - for American communists because it would put them on the front pages of the papers in their home towns.
One of the things that I have learned since trying to bring in an interesting story in under 28 pages is that we already agree on great chunks of typical superhero stories.
In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.
Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.
It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn't be torn if the pages all held together.
Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.
I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.
I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
["I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore" ] really jumped off the page. And there were so many specific notes within the context of the script. Music cues, for instance.
The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
I drove past one of the houses in Tiruvanmiyur and asked them if we could shoot there for 'Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya' because it seemed straight out of the pages of the script.
When I moved from Cambridge, I donated all my fiction. I carefully cut out pages the authors had autographed for me. I didn't want those autographed books showing up on eBay.
There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page
I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.
On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages.
Who needs soap operas now when we have social media timelines? Now you can get a similar drama fix by just paying attention to your friends and family members' Facebook pages.
I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.
My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.
I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial.
When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.
Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.
I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.
If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.
The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song.
I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages.
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.
I love the op-ed pages of the 'L.A. Times,' the 'Washington Post' and the 'New York Times.' There's just no substitute for the people who are thinking and writing on those pages.
Some people say that they read the first 20 pages, and then decide if they want to do the film or not. But, I have to read the entire thing cause anything can change in a script.
As an actor, I like to get a bit of momentum going with a character and kind of work a bit quicker. I mean, not crazy-fast, but, you know, five or six pages a day is a nice pace.
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.