Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.
My memory is basically visual: that’s what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.
I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.
When you’re on a submarine you’re usually underwater for months at a time, and you don’t get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they’re maybe two sentences. They’re very short.
Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don’t get it. I don’t get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I’m doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had.
I’m very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, ‘That’s the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.’
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn’t matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.
Knut Hamsun’s writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.
There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don’t know any of these writers.
Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
Federal law provides very powerful tools, such as strict mandatory sentences, to go after repeat violent offenders who are illegally in the possession of a gun.
The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
The pressure isn’t on my brain, but on my mouth. I realized Sam Malone said very little, he spoke in little sentences. Which is much more comfortable for me for some reason.
Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.
Transgender people frequently face bias in court and are assigned unsupportive public defenders, factors which lead to more extreme sentences and longer incarcerations.
I’ll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you’re trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
Vigorous writing is concise. 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.
Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
Waka Flocka Flame, some of his lyrics are, like, common sentences. But just the way he is, and the way he delivers it, makes it this crazy metal hip-hop.
I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers – I didn’t get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.
My copy of ‘Night’ is dog-eared. The pages are filled with plastic colored ‘flags’ that are blue, green, purple, and yellow. Vocabulary is in the margins; phrases and sentences are underlined, some with pencil, and some with pen. Many words are circled.
My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it’s like I am sending them a letter.
Notoriously outspoken, his sentences always punctuated with profanities, General George S. Patton was the epitome of what a leader should be like – or so he thought. Patton believed a leader should look and act tough, so he cultivated his image and his personality to match his philosophy.
Actors don’t need a lot of talk beyond the first few sentences. They may say they don’t draw on their own life, but all actors do.
It’s a knack that my mother doesn’t have. The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn’t string two sentences together. It’s about the only thing she can’t do.
I have prosecuted very serious criminals who are now serving very long jail sentences.
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
Lots of kids, including my son, have trouble making the leap from reading words or a few sentences in picture books to chapter books. Chapters are often long… 10 pages can seem like a lifetime to a young reader. Then reading becomes laborious and serious. That’s why some of the chapters in my books are very short.
I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that’s something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.
I don’t really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don’t read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
I like Baudelaire’s sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.
Data do not indicate that mandatory minimum sentences keep our communities safer. Instead, mandatory minimums are disproportionately harming people and communities of color.
I read ‘The Great Gatsby’ in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.
Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.
Speaking and singing were equally common in my house. I started songwriting about the time that I started forming sentences.
I reiterate my proposal of creating life sentences for politicians who make deals with organized criminals. They deserve the maximum penalty because a politician that makes deals with criminals – I’ve said it, and I repeat it – is no longer a politician but just another ‘capo.’
Tons of people struggle to pronounce words, remember information, and string sentences together, particularly as they age. Biden, already the oldest president in U.S. history, is no exception.
I’m so uncomfortable, especially in emotional situations, having to say sentences that don’t feel right. As an actor – or really, as any kind of person sensitive to it.
I ought to be more hardboiled; I’d like to be. I don’t think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes… I can’t do it, so why bother trying?
I don’t begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don’t mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
To show men that crimes can be pardoned, and that punishment is not their inevitable consequence, encourages the illusion of impunity and induces the belief that, since there are pardons, those sentences which are not pardoned are violent acts of force rather than the products of justice.
How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it’s your book that’s coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.
It’s weird when people start sentences with ‘frankly’ – as if their other sentences don’t count.
I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say.
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.
Elvis Presley, you can’t define him in a couple of sentences, but he was a country boy and he was very respectful.
Over the years, I’ve trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.
I got over 20 people out of prison, some with life sentences and others based on getting their sentences reduced.
The fact is that most ‘Irish-Americans’, in spite of dropping the word ‘Irish’ into half of all sentences, couldn’t find Europe on an atlas, let alone Ireland.
