Art & Creativity Quote by Norton Juster

Writing becomes rehearsal, not performance: the real work happens offstage, in the pages that never make the cut. Juster frames “pages and pages of conversation” as deliberate waste, but it’s a craft logic architects instantly recognize. You sketch, you draft, you build models that won’t survive the final structure because their job is discovery. The “book” is the building; the discarded dialogue is the scaffolding.

The intent is quietly defiant against a productivity culture that worships clean outputs. Juster isn’t confessing indulgence; he’s describing method. Those conversations “don’t necessarily end up” in the story because their purpose isn’t plot delivery, it’s intimacy. Dialogue here is a diagnostic tool: you press characters into speech until their rhythms, evasions, and contradictions reveal themselves. By the time the “real” scenes appear, the characters carry an unseen history of things they almost said. That subtext is what readers experience as depth.

The line also smuggles in a gentle rebuke to the notion that characters are inventions you control. Juster suggests you meet them, you spend time with them, you listen. It’s less puppeteering than reconnaissance. Coming from an architect, the analogy sharpens: you can’t design a livable space by staring at the facade; you need to understand how people move through it, where they hesitate, what they bump into. His private conversations are test-walks through the emotional floor plan.

Context matters: Juster’s fiction, famously playful and precise, depends on internal coherence. The whimsy works because the unseen structure is sturdy.