Top 100 Off The Page Quotes
#1. Sharon Shinn is a lover of words and a builder of worlds. She makes science-fiction seem like fantasy. Her characters jump off the page, finding their way under your skin and into your heart.
Alethea Kontis
#2. There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.
Harrison Birtwistle
#3. He has such a patronizing tone and manner, and such a sarcastic sense of humor. I found him rather brutal, a kind of elegant brutality which appealed. No, I think he came pretty much off the page.
Jeremy Northam
#4. When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#5. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.
Denise Duhamel
#6. The impulse to tell the truth was not as great as the fear of being left off the page.
Jonathan Messinger
#7. The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.
William J. Brennan
#8. Something taken off the page can sound great, I guess. Usually it doesn't. It seems like lately Pitchfork is trying to champion lyric writers more.
Stephen Malkmus
#9. When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
Taiye Selasi
#10. You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.
Kate Morton
#11. Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
Jane Hirshfield
#12. Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?
Jerry Spinelli
#13. I started reading the Bible. All of a sudden the words jumped off the page and became real.
Austin Peck
#14. What are you reading?"
She replied without once taking her eyes off the page. "I am reading the sort of sentimental novel men dismiss as rubbish but could actually stand to learn a thing or two from."
"That's an awfully long title," he remarked dryly.
Maya Rodale
#15. I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.
Lorraine Toussaint
#16. Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream.
Tana French
#17. I hate this bizarre policy of protective exclusion, because it effectively writes me off the page.
Sara Gruen
#18. Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.
Carole King
#19. Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.
Jonathan Lethem
#20. 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.
Taylor Hackford
#21. The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.
Angela Lansbury
#22. His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.
Jami Attenberg
#23. I'm never quite sure what I'm looking for in a comic book! It just jumps off the page somehow and hits you square between the eyeballs and you know that's the artist for the story.
William Katt
#24. The Republicans finally got some good news over the weekend. The North Koreans set off a nuclear bomb. Thank God. It was so powerful it knocked the Mark Foley story right off the front page. And knocked him off the page he was on, too.
Jay Leno
#25. I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.
Francis Spufford
#26. I loved the tone and the characters. They're all very different and they're all very typical for their time. When you read the screenplay you feel like meeting them and getting them off the page and on to the screen.
Lone Scherfig
#27. It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.
Herbert Bayard Swope
#28. She looks like she's at peace," I hear, over and over. Or "She looks just like herself, don't she?" Neither one of these is true. She looks like an illustration in a book, two-dimensional, when she ought to be leaping off the page. When
Jodi Picoult
#29. And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig
#30. When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.
Tayari Jones
#31. I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.
Damian Barr
#32. For Arthur, words gathered in waterfall thoughts that spilled off the page into the pools of imaginaton collecting in his head.
Christopher Scotton
#33. Auditions are an opportunity to play and go in there and bring the character to life. The writers have it stuck in their head and haven't seen it jump off the page.
Jodie Sweetin
#34. I'm bored with the same genre, the same remakes of things. I like original ideas and high-concept things where it's off the page and kind of fantastical.
Nina Dobrev
#35. Imagine your shadow burning off the page / As the dear world and the dead word disengage
Don Paterson
#36. I feel as though my career really hit its high point when I was cast as a supporting actress in 'American Wedding'. I thought the script had a lot of depth and intelligence, and it really just jumped off the page.
January Jones
#37. Every reader wants the same thing: to open the cover of a book and watch the words explode like fireworks off the page.
Kim Lehman
#38. Back in 2004, Kellie Overbey handed me her play 'Girl Talk' to read. I fell in love with her brutally delicious humor and the fearlessly deft way in which she drew her characters. They jumped off the page and begged me to give them a space in which to stomp around.
Carrie Preston
#39. ... and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!
Gilbert Sorrentino
#40. I'd like my readers to feel they want to follow my characters off the page at the end of the book.
Vanessa Couchman
#41. They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people's lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#42. 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.
Peter Matthiessen
#43. Many children do not realize that they have a problem, much less that they need to seek help. One youngster commented that he thought all people saw words 'running off the page but that they were all quick enough to catch them'. He was not.
Dr Kate McMahon
#44. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.
Rick Riordan
#45. What's frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don't take chances. A big-budget movie, that script's your bible; nobody's going to risk going off the page. But when you're doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, intellectually, artistically?
Lance Henriksen
#46. I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.
Chris Wooding
#47. Why are other people profiting off that? I can see that if I have the page and sold it for $50 and 20 years later somebody's got it for $200, okay. That's business. But I had no say in that art being out there. It just really burns me.
Mike Royer
#48. One of the glories of education is the opportunity to hear the truth come out of a human being with blood in the veins and air in the lungs, and not just off a printed page.
Douglas Wilson
#49. Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.
Dennis Lehane
#50. To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.
Alberto Manguel
#51. The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound
#52. When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent.
Joe Pantoliano
#53. If you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing ... so it didn't matter what other bands were doing ... we did what we were doing ...
Jimmy Page
#55. I know all's fair in love and war but when you go off and try to be by yourself and it ends up on the front page of the press it's frightening, knowing your life is under such scrutiny.
Michael Hutchence
#56. He is a man of the Night's Watch, She thought, as he sang about some stupid lady throwing herself off some stupid tower because her stupid prince was dead. The lady should go kill the ones who killed her prince. Arya Stark (page 514)
George R R Martin
#57. Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize.
Mike McCue
#58. and then he would be off. Probably a good job Jeanie had decided to go home as he hadn't enough cash on him to keep her supplied with gin all night. Still, it was pay day tomorrow. Across the bar his eye fell on a man trying to catch the
Lynda Page
#59. Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,' ... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.
Jess Walter
#60. A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.
Alfred Kazin
#61. The Latin root of decide means "to cut off all possibility." So a person who actually made a true decision to accomplish something would have no alternative but to do what they decided.
Diamond Dallas Page
#62. The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.
Colum McCann
#63. The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.
Charles Bukowski
#64. I've made mistakes, I clearly did, but what I was hoping for was that some other dumbass would get on the front page and take me off the hook. I miss Lane Kiffin.
Bruce Pearl
#65. I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.
Robert Reed
#66. This place we're flying over now isn't in the atlas, is it?' the pilot said, grinning. 'You're darn right it isn't in the atlas!' cried the Head of the Air Force. 'We've flown clear off the last page!
Roald Dahl
#67. Shit, Millie thought. Did she look like she was about to croak or something? So what if she had just turned sixty; she didn't feel sixty and she didn't feel like she looked that old. This was happening all the time now. It pissed her off. She didn't want to make a scene, so she forced
Anita Page
#68. There was something so cool about being able to carry this film [Into the Forest] together [with Ellen Page] and to play off of each other. It was like having the most worthy tennis opponent.
Evan Rachel Wood
#69. First off, the PS2 and PSP can play against each other online.
Tim Page
#70. The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.
Kunal Nayyar
#71. It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
Michael Pollan
#72. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#73. The girl looked up, blinking, a far-off expression in here eyes. I recognized it, understood the shock of realizing the world inside your book wasn't real. Even worse, you were in another world entirely and no one understood - or even cared - that you preferred the one living on the page.
Michelle Zink
#74. He broke off and began to walk u and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#75. No one looks like Fang-dark and still and dangerous, like he's daring you to set him off. But I'd seen him rocking Angel when she'd hurt herself; I'd seen him smile in his sleep; I'd seen the deep, darkl ight in his eyes as he leaned over me...
~Max; "Max"; page 24
James Patterson
#76. Once you join the queue for the immigration line, pay attention to what the expeditor tells you. Have your papers ready. Don't have your cell phone out. Take off your hat. Open your passport to the page with your photo and present it to the immigration officer already open.
Hanya Yanagihara
#77. I'm always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it's full of all these made-up words.
Alastair Reynolds
#78. One of my favorite actors is Paul Newman. He could tell so much with a single look, whereas some actors would need an entire five page monologue to give off the feeling of what he could say with just a single look.
Ryan Kwanten
#79. The big rumor going around is, we may begin bombing Iraq. Or, as the White House calls it, Operation Keep Enron Off The Front Page.
Jay Leno
#80. The entire life and work of Jesus is one great argument why we should listen to his word. Page after page of the New Testament Gospels pile up reasons to turn off the television and listen to Jesus.
John Piper
#81. In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.
Christopher Guest
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Cassandra Clare
#83. After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#84. People are put off by the perception of science fiction, and it doesn't help if you've got references to quantum this and quantum that on the first page, and people think, 'This isn't for me,' and chuck it. I'm probably a pretty bad offender, given how far in the future some of my stuff is.
Peter F. Hamilton
#85. You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.
Anne Perry
#86. I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.
Tess Gerritsen
#87. I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.
Billy Connolly
#88. I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.
Nick Harkaway
#89. I don't have any kids, so I'm not as worried about my heirs as the rest of you, but still: I think the youth of tomorrow might be better off if they knew the physical sensation of cracking a spine and turning the page.
Lisa Lutz
#90. I think about how much of a good story seems to happen elsewhere, off the canvas or screen or page, in Europe or a backwater New Brunswick town, in what is left unsaid. A word on the tip of the tongue, ungraspable. The teasing smush of a feather boa over naked breasts in a striptease.
Lisa Moore
#91. I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.
Pat Conroy
#92. Whenever Ter read a book, rarely - he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons. 33
Lucia Berlin
#93. Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.
The Script
#94. Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.
M.C. Scott
#95. There's a famous tension between Green Lantern and Green Arrow in the comic books. Those guys have always been friends. They started off as not on the same page, and then they quickly became best friends.
Geoff Johns
#96. Remember me as of ages ago and days gone long,
When we'd go off at a tangent along;
Thy page- dyed pieces among
The rest I have known a poem.
Mpho Leteng
#97. That's the girl ... that's the girl
" Annabeth punched him in the nose and knocked him flat. "And you," she told him, "lay off my friend.
Rick Riordan
#98. Lily opened the door. "Maude, would you - " She cut herself off. Maude was nowhere in sight, but Caliban was across the room, holding a page of her play to the light of the fire. His eyes were intent, his brow slightly creased - and he was quite obviously reading the page.
Elizabeth Hoyt
#99. Whatever is on the page is what I'm married to. I'm very prepared. I'm a thespian. I don't like to improv. I don't like to go off course 'cause I think that's where stuff happens. When you stick to the material 'cause it's written so well, that's where the magic happens.
Kevin Hart
#100. I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.
Kingsley Amis
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