I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose – and people who aren’t related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.
America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
I guess I cringe when the discussion leads to, rather than books and sentences and characters and the stuff that writers are supposed to be concerned with, how to have an online presence and how many followers you have on Twitter. That stuff always makes me uncomfortable.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.
Phrasing is the idea of finding sentences and using punctuation in speech. I often look at the score to see what’s written in by the composer to see if I can find clues to those directions, like what direction did the composer have in mind, and I try to incorporate those things as much as possible.
Smart on Crime says if you commit violent crimes, you should go to jail, and go to jail for extended periods of time. For people who are engaged in non-violent crimes – any crimes, for that matter – we are looking for sentences that are proportionate to the conduct that you engaged in.
When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I’d draw it.
I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don’t notice because you’re so interested in what’s happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.
A good pastor knows when they can’t put two sentences together.
A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that’s great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
Andy wasn’t capable of any complicated thoughts or ideas. Ideas need a verb and a noun, a subject. Andy spoke in a kind of stumbling staccato. You had to finish sentences for him. So Andy operated through people who could do things for him. He wished things into happening, things he himself couldn’t do.
The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
Sentences are like just caught fish. Spunky today, stinky tomorrow.
The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.
I’m crap at interviews. I’m just not very good at sentences.
I had a lot of trouble speaking as a kid. I didn’t really speak in coherent sentences until I was, like, 6 years old. There was a long time where everybody was very worried, because my sisters were so advanced for their age, and I would barely talk.
Most of the American skyjackers who fled abroad eventually elected to return to the United States, having tired of life on the lam. These homecomings typically involved prearranged surrenders to the FBI, in the hopes of earning lenient sentences.
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
No matter what you say in carefully chosen sentences, girls will detect both the spoken and unspoken messages.
Republicans just can’t help themselves. They get in front of a live microphone and within a few sentences are rocketing down the swiftest and most direct route to the all-you-can-eat comedian-and-talk-show-host buffet.
Some people write a thank you note for a gift, and it’s three pages long, and some people write a thank you note, and it’s five sentences – that’s me. I like to pare away words because I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
In my day-to-day, I might speak, like, 10 sentences.
I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I’ve used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn’t decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple – or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren’t.
Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don’t think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.
I mean people just have a way of – y’know they’ll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don’t want to be in.
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
If you’re still wondering about details – how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever – when you’re writing, you can’t pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.
I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that’s not a bad way to write.
If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That’s generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.
Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking or his writing.
Growing up as an Asian American, we’re lucky to have two sentences in a history book about the Chinese-American experience.
I don’t really think about the fact that a lot of people are watching ‘DSDS’ or about the way I should phrase my sentences.
It’s a complicated issue, and you can’t boil it down in a tweet… two sentences cannot sum up the whole gun debate… The minute you try to talk about it honestly and openly, you get raked over the coals.
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
What to do about these increases in crime? Plenty of laws already exist to punish violent criminals, and research questions the level of correlation between longer sentences and lower crime rates.
If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it’s likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences.
Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
Keep your mouth shut and see what’s happening around you. Don’t finish people’s sentences for them. Don’t just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they’re saying it. That was great training for writing.
The formerly incarcerated – returning citizens – often face a cruel irony in America. Having paid their debt to society, too many are banned from the ballot box that could help them dismantle policies that essentially extend their sentences.
When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they’d kind of be like popcorn kernels popping… all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.
Prison conditions in some parts of the world can be very poor, overcrowded and, in some cases, dangerous and sentences can be much tougher than in the U.K.
If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
