Top 100 On The Page Quotes
#1. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
Will Self
#2. Work. Write. Read. Keep putting words on the page, because that's the only way you'll get better.
S.J. Watson
#3. The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can't write - really that's exactly what you need to write.
Cheryl Strayed
#4. A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#5. Write a page every single day, even if what you put on the page that day is no good - it's the only way to get better.
Emma Forrest
#6. I don't use a stylist. I know what I like, so I do it myself. I rip things out from fashion magazines. It's easy to order when the phone number is right on the page.
Aerin Lauder
#7. I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.
Jeff Tweedy
#8. I wouldn't say I see things visually first, but what I do think is important, for a lot of screenwriters, is to not just think about the words on the page, but also the world as a whole and the vibe of the movie, rather than a sequence of scenes written on the page.
Evan Daugherty
#9. I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.
Patricia McCormick
#10. Personally, I need to learn every word on the page before I go in and audition. I have not mastered the skill of holding pages in my hand and acting with pages in my hand. I find that every time I have to look at the page it takes me completely out of the scene.
Freddy Rodriguez
#11. It's just a matter of me opening up the page and whatever is written on the page, that's what I'm here to do.
Anthony Anderson
#12. The hardest thing is to write about people. First and foremost, you have to encounter their humanity. That is the only way you can make them live as characters on the page.
Philip Kerr
#13. 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
#14. The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.
Joanna Kerns
#15. I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.
Tom Waits
#16. Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle
#17. Rejection process is not fun. It's the red pen on the page, the discarded sketch, sometimes is the only way forward.
Jonah Lehrer
#18. The flaw of an amateur is to assume what's in our head is what's on the page.
David Morrell
#19. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
Zadie Smith
#20. To write well is to have felt a tingle of joy in your being; to have left a little of your blood on the page' B.J.Kibble, author of DRY RAIN, LEGION, CHASING THE WIND,and CRIES FROM THE GRAVE.
B.J. Kibble
#21. The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
Alice Sebold
#22. The lines on the page were pulled tight, like a man screaming, but not "Joe, where are you?" More like Joe, where is anything?
Charles Bukowski
#23. Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#24. If anyone had been paying attention to the signs, they would have realized that air turns white when things are about to change, that paper cuts mean there's more to what's written on the page than meets the eye, and that birds are always out to protect you from things you don't see.
Sarah Addison Allen
#25. When a book is read an irrevocable thing happens - a murder, followed by an imposture. The story in the mind murders the story on the page, and takes its place.
Mike Carey
#26. What appears on the page comes out of your experience, and no-one is going to see it in quite the same way - so, that being so, you're already doing something in a thoroughly individual and idiosyncratic way anyway.
Ronald Frame
#27. I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love - how what's left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what's written on the page.
Tiffany Baker
#28. They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page.
Richard Yates
#29. I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.
Tracy K. Smith
#30. The water color process takes me and itself to a destination I hadn't even known existed ... Whatever I put down on the page, the paint will dry as it wants to.
Joseph Raffael
#31. Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
Natasha Trethewey
#32. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature.
H.A.L. Fisher
#33. It's important to put aside your internal editor and just get words down on the page when working on a first draft.
S.J. Scott
#34. If you want to be a successful writer you have to put your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard and put words on the page. Even shitty words are better than no words. You can go back and fix them later.
Liliana Hart
#35. I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
Jim Jarmusch
#37. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Eudora Welty
#38. Being a musician, you want to be able to do the hardest stuff there is. People would think it's classical, but in classical, it's all on the page and the difficulty is keeping up with the music.
Brian McKnight
#39. People in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn't possible on the page or screen.
Gloria Steinem
#40. Finish the damn book. Nothing else matters. Stop second guessing yourself and write it through to the end. You don't know what you have until you've finished it. You don't know how to fix it until it's all down on the page.
Lauren Beukes
#41. I was looking for what rarely ends up on the page, because history is so much more than that which is written down.
David Van Reybrouck
#42. I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.
Sadie Jones
#43. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.
Barbara Kingsolver
#44. Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.
Idris Elba
#45. I have to find the heart of every subject as fast as I can, pin it down on the page, and then cut it wide open for the audience to see.
Mira Grant
#46. Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.
Beverly Lewis
#47. I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.
Brian Selznick
#48. I'm not one of those actors who likes to analyze things too much, so I trust what the writers are doing with the characters, in order to give them their journey. My job is to come in and try to make those words on the page come alive on camera.
John Barrowman
#49. It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.
Dakota Johnson
#50. In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.
James Arthur
#51. Words on the page don't have the same impact as somebody saying the words to you.
Rik Mayall
#52. The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
Ben Kingsley
#53. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#54. The good thing about being on a show like 'Justified' is that you stick to the premise, but not necessarily every single word that's on the page.
Mykelti Williamson
#55. When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
#56. Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.
Fay Weldon
#57. [T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.
Natalie Goldberg
#58. Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.
Irving Penn
#59. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
Anne Enright
#60. I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#61. Depicting yourself as a whole person on the page doesn't only mean recognizing your role in a bad situation. It means being emotionally authentic. It means showing all of yourself: the shameful parts, the embarrassing parts, the parts that you might regret or that you wish weren't true.
Kerry Cohen
#62. I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.
I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family - two unsent letters - I wrote: I am the director of my life.
Aspen Matis
#63. I always write to understand my place in the world. I can see myself and my life unfold on the page, and I can understand my strengths, my weaknesses - I can see where I need to step up a bit.
Jason Mraz
#64. For me, it's always about what's on the page. I have tremendous respect for writing. When you recognize good writing, and you're lucky enough to get it, like with 'Lost,' that's what I follow.
Nestor Carbonell
#65. We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
Calvin Trillin
#66. That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.
Anne McCaffrey
#67. Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you.
Scott Westerfeld
#68. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.
David Abram
#69. My favorite part is the preparation because you read on the page, you get this character.
Ashley Scott
#70. We create an interior 'movie' in the reader's head through words on the page.
Philip Gerard
#71. When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Eudora Welty
#72. Writing isn't just on the page; it's voices in the reader's head. Read what you write out loud to someone-anyone-and you will catch all kinds of things.
Donna Jo Napoli
#73. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn.
Valeria Luiselli
#74. By deciding what is, and is not, allowed to be discussed in a review,
by removing discussion of social context, and saying that only the
words on the page count, Goodreads is ignoring fifty years of development
of literary criticism, and is engaging in censorship.
G.R. Reader
#75. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier.
Miguel Ferrer
#76. I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.
Paul Beatty
#77. I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.
Garth Nix
#78. There are certain episodes that on the page I thought, "Oh boy, this is going to be the funniest episode." And there are other ones that went in, fingers crossed, saying, "Oh well, let's hope something good comes out of it." Oftentimes, those ones wind up being the best ones.
Charlie Day
#79. I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people.
Lisa Unger
#80. To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
Will Self
#81. These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.
Terry Tempest Williams
#82. Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.
Mike White
#83. I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I'm pleased the stuff on the page isn't inside me any more.
Joanne Harris
#84. I think what's difficult is proving to people that a script actually does work and sometimes the laughter might not be on the page, it might be between the lines.
Alice Lowe
#85. If somebody has a better idea than me, I'll take it if it surpasses what we have on the page because at the end of the day, it's me that takes the credit anyway!
Guy Ritchie
#86. Write what you really care about. Write what you want to say because that is the experience that always rates as genuine on the page.
Betsy Beers
#87. I'd been auditioning for parts for years. I never got any better at it. I'm crap at auditions. I know there are people who can walk into those rooms and make those lines sing on the page and get the job immediately. I wasn't one of them. I'm still not one of them.
Jamie Dornan
#88. I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn't bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I'd bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with.
Diablo Cody
#89. I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.
Denis Leary
#90. You will not read voice on the page; you will hear it in your head.
Philip Gerard
#91. Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and dam the whole thing up.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#92. In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
Pico Iyer
#93. Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.
Zadie Smith
#94. The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.
Ann Patchett
#95. You embraced what was already on the page, worked with it, massaged it.
Jane Espenson
#96. The writer has the advantage of a medium that can be contemplated many times over on the pages of a book or a magazine. The words lie on the page and the writer has an extended opportunity to imprint on his reader every meaning and nuance distilled from experience.
Bienvenido Lumbera
#97. Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Zadie Smith
#98. I started writing because I decided I was too old to play pretend in the backyard. Then I found that I could create those imaginary worlds on the page.
Veronica Roth
#99. If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.
Richard Peck
#100. I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
Mark Billingham
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