“I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary. It was Mick Jagger's idea.The other one was Simple Plan, based on a novel by Scott Smith. It's a great book - really stark, not a comedy - about a guy who finds $4 million in a plane crash and decides to keep it.” FirstsTwoBookIdeasFilmGuySimpleHalfMillionsNovelComedyPlansWrittenProjectsStonesFollowingPlanesConcertsCrashRollingDocumentariesStarksRolling StonesGreat BookPseudoTwo GuysJaggerPlane CrashesSimple Plan Author:Ben Stiller
“Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.” WritingYearsBookRoomsNumbersHalfMillionsNovelFiguresCoupleThousandPaperComputerHundredPensOccupationSolitary Author:Neil Gaiman
“If you take a big epic novel and you shoot it, when you get to the editing room you notice that it has 2 million climaxes, which fill the whole 90 or 100 minutes. Then you realize you can't cut them out because if somebody is dying and you cut that out it seems like they just disappear from the film.” IfsWholeBigsSeemsFilmRealizingRoomsMillionsNovelCuttingMinutesDyingDisappearEpicEditingClimax Author:Pirjo Honkasalo
“It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.” WritingYearsKindChildrenBookHardRunningRememberRoomsFictionMillionsNovelWrittenCoupleYears AgoEmptyWestI RealizedJournalismSatPensAwardsNon FictionScreenwritersChildren's Books Author:Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal
“I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.” MayDoeSimpleAnswersBrainMillionsNovelFireWrittenOne DayEnglandBackgroundsContemporaryJournalism Author:Sebastian Faulks
“I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.” WayKindLittlesBodyNextMillionsCasesNovelMinutesSceneMarinePrecariousReefsCoral Reefs Author:Dean Koontz
“I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.” WritingYearsI CanMillionsNovelFourEnviousStanleyMasons Author:James Thayer