I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
What Labor has said very clearly is that there should be up to life sentences for people who traffic in guns.
I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren’t that terrific.
When you’re writing there’s a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.
When I use the word ‘buzz’ in successive sentences, it’s clearly time for me to stop writing.
Cliched characters are cliches because they’re people being described by people who are on the outside. If you take two sentences from anybody and reduce them to just that, that’s what you’re going to get.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Guys, there’s only one thing I hate more than bloggers who start sentences with ‘guys’ – and it’s those mealy-mouth hipsters who crochet codpieces and their ye-olde-sideburned friends who pickle stuff and slaughter their own gluten-free goats.
A significant number of pages and sentences that the administration wants to keep in a classified status have already been released publicly, some of it by public statements of the leadership of the CIA and the FBI.
But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.
Working at the ‘Review’, if anything, the impression you got was, ‘I’ll never be good enough. I’ll never work hard enough. I’ll never be devoted enough.’ These people are staying up all night over their sentences!
Don’t forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.
We don’t communicate in full sentences anyway. We don’t need all those words.
Whatever simplicity I’ve achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I’ve read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I’ve forgotten what the point was.
I like making things. I enjoy putting words and images on a blank space. There should be joy in the writing itself because parts of it are so challenging and lonesome. I take great pleasure in reading, researching, and interviewing. I enjoy forming my sentences and revising them to make them clean.
When I’m writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn’t working.
I believe there’s no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.
Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won’t tell and people feel it’s because I’m being secretive or something, but it’s actually because I’m ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.
