Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
Well we took it apart scene by scene. We examined every sentence, every full stop, every comma. He has a most wonderful eye for detail, Roman, and you know, he’s a very good artist.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it’s very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
I suggest we bring some normality back to this country and say if you are carrying a knife, there must be zero tolerance. If it was up to me, everyone caught with a knife would get an automatic ten year sentence.
To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.
When you start a sentence with the word ‘illegal’, you’ve got nowhere to go. An illegal is illegal.
The thing that most interests me about writing – there are lots of things, but the thing I can’t do without – is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers.
A series of small but real accomplishments gives people the energy and confidence to continue. For instance, a person who wants to write a novel might resolve to write one sentence each day. Or a person who wants to start running might resolve to run for one minute.
I think it’s really cool when artists have song titles or album names that are a really conversational sentence.
When you’re laughing aloud at David Sedaris’ every sentence, it’s easy to miss the more serious side of what he’s up to.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
The reduction in gun violence President Obama claims to desperately want comes from law enforcement and prosecution, not from political rhetoric, lectures and sentence commutations for federal firearm law offenders and felons.
My sentence formally was imposed on my mothers 50th Birthday January 24th 1983. The jury recommended it July 1st 1982.
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.
Death row was the only place where I never witnessed racism. We all went to bed with a death sentence on our heads and woke up that way. We had to become each other’s support system.
Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
The apostle Paul never seemed to exhaust the topic of grace – what makes us think we can? He just kept coming at it and coming at it from another angle. That’s the thing about grace. It’s like springtime. You can’t put it in a single sentence definition, and you can’t exhaust it.
My style is difficult to contain in a sentence; it’s ever evolving. Generally I’m drawn to clean cuts and avoid patterns. I tend to choose structure and block colors, but these are all just loose guidelines.
Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people to plea bargain and essentially convict themselves because they’re terrified of doing a life sentence for a relatively minor crime.
I remember when I was a child, the word cancer absolutely struck fear into everyones hearts. It was like a death sentence.
I never thought I’d say the sentence ‘It was a real honour’ – because that implies that you’ve done something pretty special. But now I’ve done that several times. Yesterday I was in Buckingham Palace – I actually met the Queen yesterday and that was an honour. I never thought I’d do something like that.
You don’t need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller – as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
Rather than serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years or having so many other wonderful life experiences, I could have served a longer sentence in prison for some of the stupid, reckless things I did as a teenager.
‘See Spot run!’ is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.
I’m never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape – ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: ‘The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
She can be Mary Poppins but she can also be – I would never use the word ‘crude’ in the same sentence as Julie Andrews because she is so fine and beautiful – but she can be naughty and she doesn’t mind a good joke.
There are six ‘Time Warp Trio’ books that would take a page each to fully praise. And I just thought up twelve more while I was typing this sentence.
I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.
Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It’s the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing ‘four years later’, but you can shift time in a sentence or two.
Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.
When I was first starting out in the music industry, I was always coupled in the same sentence with Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera – and I was probably the worst of them. I think a lot of people back then thought, ‘Mandy Moore… she’ll probably go back to where she came from in a year.’
Someone pointed out that Dick Enberg and Curt Gowdy are the only two ever to call a Super Bowl and a Final Four. So I’ll be the third. I get a kick out of putting my name in the same sentence as those other two giants.
Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.
You got to be careful mentioning people as great as Clint Eastwood. You can’t put me in the same sentence as that man.
Working with children is a whole other ball game. They’re like little animals. You have to keep the camera turned on them all the time. Sometimes it takes a 41-minute take to get one sentence out in a believable way.
You don’t want another Enron? Here’s your law: If a company, can’t explain, in one sentence, what it does… it’s illegal.
Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
I can’t really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.
In each medium – popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively – the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.
What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Perhaps the majority of human beings never think of standing by themselves, and choosing their own employments, till the sentence has been regularly promulgated to them, ‘It is time for you to take care of yourself.’
