Top 170 Sentences Quotes

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.

On any given day, I’m likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences – or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.

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.

I can’t tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

Throughout school I studied in Tamil medium schools but it was only when I got to college that I realized that not learning English was a great disadvantage as I didn’t understand even the simplest of sentences.

When writing, I’m not thinking about war, even if I’m writing about it. I’m thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I’m working, even if it’s on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It’s on the story.

Because of the vulgar advent, I decided to give way and, by dark and cryptic sentences, tell of the causes of the future mutation of mankind; especially the most urgent ones, and the ones I perceived, and in a manner that would not upset their fragile sentiments.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it’s only five minutes, and write three sentences.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can’t get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

‘Getting smart on crime’ does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

Throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.

The cliche of call-centre work is that it’s mainly older people who will stay on the line to talk to you. Whether through loneliness or good manners, they tend to allow you to finish your sentences, hear you out.

I still like complete sentences that are grammatically correct without spelling errors. I don’t always achieve this, and it is irksome to read a message I have sent and discover errors. I know I often leave out words in e-mail, not by choice, but because of the way my brain works.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won’t have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

Doubt is the enemy of mania. It’s trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: ‘How are you?’ and ‘I want to work with Johnny Depp.’

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

You wanna work with people who you have a rapport with. You finish each other’s sentences a bit creatively when you’ve worked together for a while.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don’t know if it’s because older women are more confident, or just that we don’t care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.

After I finish writing a chapter, I’ll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.

I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people’s relationships and interactions. I don’t want language to get in the way of that. It’s quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust – people who recognise that life doesn’t consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

I love the writing. I love the idea of typing and seeing it on the computer and printing it out myself and, you know, moving sentences around. I like that.

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.

When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don’t imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.

There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. ‘I heartily endorse the Conservative Party’ would be one. ‘I look forward to Justin Bieber’s new record’ would be another.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I’m more your paragraph kind of gal.

Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I’m seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.

What is SOCOM’s mission statement in two sentences? Most people I know in SOF cannot recite it. If it’s not clear from the bottom up, then it’s a problem.

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren’t actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.

I’m starting to think my narrators’ sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

The Lyme disease had so severely affected my brain functioning that it was extremely hard for me to think, form sentences, and stay focused.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren’t executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.

I’m constantly struggling in interviews to engage and finish sentences, because I am being asked personal questions from somebody I don’t know.

Sometimes if you tell me what a story is about in just a few sentences, I can tell you if it’s going to be a success.

I’ve got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they’re described. That’s what I love when I read.

I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.