Page 1 Quotes

I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge. ~ John Gregory Dunne

Well, if you're writing a thriller, you have to have your character in mortal jeopardy on page 1 or it's not a thriller. ~ Don Winslow

May you find good hunting, swift running, and shelter when you sleep. (Leafpool to Ashfur, page 1) ~ Erin Hunter

At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time - between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. - by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn't even begin to identify them. ~ John Green

We need to give you two a couple name," I said, taking a seat on the opposite side of the table. "Lucsey, perhaps?" Luc didn't bat an eyelash; he simply turned a page of the newspaper. "Call us what you want, Sentinel. We already have a name for you." That was alarming. Not that there was a way to avoid it, but I wasn't sure I wanted them discussing my relationship around the Ops Room table. "No, you don't." "Yes, we do." Lindsey stirred her spoon noisily around the walls of the yogurt cup to get the remaining drops. "You're Methan." "We're what?" "Methan. Merit and Ethan. Methan. ~ Chloe Neill

The most rigorous reading is to find what those words on that page mean in our own lives. ~ G. Kylene Beers

If I were a snarky Reddit user though, I would say, hypothetically, that that would just be like reading Reddit's Front Page a day later. But I'm not going to go there. ~ Alexis Ohanian

I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.
In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'
This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.
I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away. ~ Rukhsana Khan

For the most part, I don't have a Facebook page; I don't Twitter. ~ Teddy Sears

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page. ~ Kevin Crossley-Holland

I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page. ~ Monique Wittig

I remember having been with this book [Into the Forest] for a long time, and I remember the moment that she [Patricia Rozema] sent me the script and what it was like to read it for the first time. I just was so blown away by how she managed to capture the story and their relationship to each other, and the nuances of that. ~ Ellen Page

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399) ~ Jodi Picoult

And again Harry understood without having to think. It did not matter about bringing them back, for he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him. ~ J.K. Rowling

I'd always envied actors who got to play real people or got to do research. I've always just had these scripts where, I mean not in a bad way, but it was right on the page. ~ Luke Wilson

C'mon, Mee,' Henry said. 'You're among family.' 'Totally,' Kim said. ~ Gayle Forman

If we don't understand how metaphor works we will misunderstand most of what we read in the Bible. No matter how carefully we parse our Hebrew and Greek sentences, no matter how precisely we use our dictionaries and trace our etymologies, no matter how exactly we define the words on the page, if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Writing is not about the end product, yes that is extremely important. It's not even about the grammar or style you write in; style and grammar are in the eye of the beholder. With each person, someone will find problems so grammar and style are moot. Writing, truly diving in is about the creative process...discovering a newer side of yourself as you are writing; creating. The adventure from page one to being done is what it is about. Do you feel good with the end product? do you feel good half way through? The point to this is simple...feedback is vital to selling your work, paying attention to hurtful feedback can destroy your pursuit of your dreams. so write for you...sell to others but write from your soul. Whether it's fiction/faction/non fiction or somewhere in between if your heart and soul is not in it...you are not going to be happy with it. ~ Kyle Williamson

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! ~ Betty Smith

My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book. ~ James Salter

My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence. ~ Jimmy Page

I pinch the sentence's butt with my other hand and tug it from my skin like a leech, smack it back on the page and clamp the book shut. Part of it's hanging out, and it waves jerkily at me with what appears to be blatant hostility. I stick the book back on the upside-down shelf over my head, pissed off sentence first, counting on the gluey base to hold it in. All I need is a badly mangled, irate sentence stalking me. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Falco wagged her journal in front of her. "This is yours, I presume." A slow smile spread across his face. "Let's find out exactly what you've been doing, shall we?"
"Give it back!" Cass reached for the journal, but Falco easily dodged her. He opened the leather-bound book to a random page and cleared his throat. Clutching a hand to his chest, he pretended to read aloud in a high-pitched voice. "Oh, how I love the way his fingers explore my soft flesh. The way his eyes see into my very soul."
This time, Cass managed to snatch the book out of his hands. "That is not what it says."
"I guess that means you won't be keeping me warm tonight? ~ Fiona Paul

I am like glass to him, like water, Hannah thought to herself, alone now in the music room, heart racing. He sees through me, but how? Page: 97 ~ Kathryn Lasky

At heart, I would have to say I'm a pantser. I fully embrace the chaos of letting the unintended happen, on life and on the page. ~ Margaret Stohl

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

And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it up to a blank page,
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter. ~ Billy Collins

Option 2: Begin at the End It's sometimes a very fun way to open a book that you show the reader the last scene, the last page, and let them figure out how we all end up there. ~ Emma Fisher

Many contemporaries of Proust's insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice punctuated them. One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. ~ Christopher Prendergast

You can be serious without a suit ~ Larry Page

Don't let anyone, especially your doctor, tell you that A-Fib isn't that serious, or you should just learn to live with it. (Beat Your A-Fib, page 165) ~ Steve S. Ryan

It's virtually impossible for most sites to do a billion page views in a month or even a year. ~ Ross Levinsohn

As an actor, you're pretty much a hired gun. You are reading other people's words off of a page and doing what they want you to do. ~ Corey Feldman

Just a moment," David said, planting a finger on the page to mark his place in his book. "What was your name ?"
"Yuri Vedenen, moi soverenyi."
"Yuri Veneden, if you upset my wife again, I will kill you where you stand."
The monk swallowed. "Yes, moi soverenyi."
"Oh, David," Genya said, taking his hand. "You've never theatened to murder anyone for me before."
"Haven't I?" He murmured distractedly, placed a kiss on her knuckles, and continued reading. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If it's something I feel I can do alright, I like being in those, and some that I think Schneider and Spade would be funnier at than me, I tell them to do it. I don't have any clue how we decide. There's this thing, this Click actually, one of my friends called me up, my partner told me about this idea that Steve Koren had. Steve Koren, by the way, the guy who wrote it with Mark O'Keefe, Steve Koren I've known since I was 22. He was a page at Saturday Night Live. ~ Adam Sandler

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT.

As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help - aka Mr. Napp - only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the "save" button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one's only recourse - unpalatable though it may be - is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one's limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends - all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed.

Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former maso ~ Julie Schumacher

We try to, when you come to Google, fulfill that need that you have as quickly as possible. ~ Larry Page

Choose beliefs that serve your soul - choose beliefs that serve the grander dream of who you choose to be. ~ Joy Page

LAURA ATCHISON, Author of "What Would A Wise Woman Do?", on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:
"Truth is always wilder than fiction.
Hold on to your hats and enjoy this page turning look inside the world of sports betting from a good girl gone bad for love. ~ Laura Atchison

It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is. ~ Sarah Dessen

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me. ~ Jami Attenberg

A voluntary act to fill empty hours had become intensive labor streaked with the bad feelings that ride the skin like pollen when too much about one's neighbors is known. ~ Toni Morrison

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work
like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work ... Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos. ~ P.K. Page

Between you and me,
the words,
like mortar,
separating, holding together
those pieces of the structure ourselves.
To say them,
to cast their shadows on the page,
is the act of binding mutual passions,
is cognizance, yourself/myself,
of our sameness under skin;
it rears possible cathedrals
indicating infinity with steeply-high styli.
For when tomorrow comes it is today,
and if it is not the drop
that is eternity
glistening at the pen's point,
then the ink of our voices
surrounds like an always night,
and mortar marks the limit of our cells. ~ Roger Zelazny

You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for. ~ Diana Athill