What I don’t like about Washington, if we say one syllable or one sentence, or this guy said something bad about me, then, all of a sudden, they have to be my mortal enemy. I don’t think that’s how it works in American business.
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
I’m a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.
There’s a certain kind of academic that comes to Washington and can’t survive. They’re the ones starting each sentence with ‘The economic model says.’
As for writing novels – it’s what I’ve done for 30 some-odd years. I can’t suddenly say I’m going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I’ll keep at it.
I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It’s like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess – it’s not going to make sense.
It can be summed up in one sentence. Does this person have something to teach my students? No one has ever let us down.
Writing can’t be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It’s not when I’m crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it’s very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
An understanding of Sor Juana’s work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.
I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.
The original ‘Hobbit’ was never intended to have a sequel – Bilbo ‘remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long’: a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.
There are no seasons anymore. Fashion has become one long run-on sentence.
When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.
Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it – the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.
I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect… of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted – first!… in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.
AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.
I was condemned to be beheaded, or burnt, as the king pleased; and he was graciously pleased, from the great remains of his love, to choose the mildest sentence.
A good procrastination should feel like you’re inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life.
Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.
In truth, we have delayed to pass sentence on the person of our lord the king, waiting, if perhaps he may, by God’s grace, repent; but we will pass it ere long unless he does repent.
It rarely adds anything to say, ‘In my opinion’ – not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion; and you are not the Pope.
The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
I think it’s hard to describe my style in one sentence. It depends on how I’m feeling. Sometimes I’ll dress more street; other times, I’ll dress more classy. I have so many different ways that I can express myself, so my style is pretty versatile.
It is important that gang members are aware that if they engage in aggravated assault, maiming, kidnapping, or manslaughter that they will receiving a minimum sentence of 30 years.
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that’s the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
You can’t just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.
My daughter’s first sentence was, ‘Dada no hair.’ And I was, like, ‘No Jasmine, Dada does have hair, Dada just shaves his head.’
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.
America is a grateful nation. We cannot allow anything or anyone to get in the way of that. The words ‘veteran’ and ‘backlog’ should never appear in the same sentence.
Addressing politics in my music’ is such a phrase, a sentence on paper, that I hate. That’s not really me because at the end of the day, I wasn’t a political science major and I wasn’t educated in that sense so I hate when people talk about things they don’t know anything about.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
When I die, if the word ‘thong’ appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I’ve screwed up.
I don’t know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head – ‘There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn’t in the mood for it’ – and I knew I had a novel.
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
I’m a ‘frotteur,’ someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.
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.
Making films can be absolutely fantastic, but it can also be incredibly dull. You spend the whole day sitting by yourself in your trailer and then you get called to deliver one sentence – then you’re told to come back and do it again at 5:30 the following morning.
The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can’t pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can’t make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.
I tell myself, ‘You’re great, you’re powerful, you’re strong. You’re the greatest, most powerful, strongest fighter in the world.’ I acknowledge my greatness. I bow down before my greatness. I inflate myself like that, and then I pop the balloon in a single sentence by saying: You can be beaten.
So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won’t come out that way – it’ll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don’t really control that.
‘Reno 911: Miami!’ is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews – good and mostly bad – nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that’s more awkward.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
There are still parts of the country where it’s hard: when you realize you’re gay, it’s like a death sentence.
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
Who on earth is going to use ‘utilize’ in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type ‘z,’ when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can’t think of a sentence in which ‘use’ can’t replace ‘utilize.’
