Sentence Quotes

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving

Important, Put, Place

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving

Life, Mean, Pretty

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
Wallace Shawn

Time, Writing, Thinking

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
David Mitchell

True, Become, Adept

If you are moneyed or educated, you will get a different sentence than someone who is not.
Nancy Grace

Someone, Different, Educated

An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Light, Whole, Quotation

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

End, Last, Beginning

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
Don DeLillo

Truth, Waiting, End

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
Don DeLillo

Truth, Integrity, Down

However, those who have used those words use half the sentence to fit their purpose, which, of course, I believe is to discredit me and the new Nation of Islam that has come up around me.
Louis Farrakhan

Islam, Words, Around

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
Henning Mankell

Work, Good, After

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.
Mitch Albom

Yourself, Powerful, Writing

It's hard to write when you think every sentence is going to be read by a million kids.
Anthony Horowitz

Hard, Kids, Write

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
Anthony Horowitz

Time, Together, Again

Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
Jackson Browne

Often, Language, English

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
Michael Ondaatje

Trust, Time, Human

It's funny, though, speaking of fathers and sons, because me and John Goodman played father and son, like, five or six years ago in the film 'Death Sentence,' and I got back with him again in 'Inside Llewyn Davis.'
Garrett Hedlund

Funny, Death, Father

I suggest we bring some normality back to this country and say if you are carrying a knife, there must be zero tolerance. If it was up to me, everyone caught with a knife would get an automatic ten year sentence.
Simon Cowell

Country, Everyone, Year

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.
Joshua Foer

Person, Group, Action

The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
John McGahern

Important, Book, Evening

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
Lionel Trilling

Legal, End, Someone

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.
Chaim Potok

Problem, Problems, Write

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.
Clifford Geertz

Until, Leave, Satisfied

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk, Jr.

Words, Same, Reason

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
Laura Marling

Life, Fear, Human

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker

Poetry, Words, Together

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
Michael Cunningham

Single, Down, Find

I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.
Garth Ennis

Faith, God, Put

And that's one thing that helps me is I learn it blandly, vanilla, then I don't try to act it too soon because you start to act it, and you kind of go away from what the next sentence is, what the next paragraph is. So get it down so it kind of can - it's in there so you can then, as I call it, dance on top of it.
Jeff Daniels

Down, Try, Away

To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.
Hugh Prather

Live, Sure, Results

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