I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
People think my name is Morpheus. Many times, people will say to me, ‘Morpheus!’ and I will complete the sentence by saying, ‘is not my name!’
It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person’s life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader’s style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.
A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.
I’m not a booky actor, I don’t go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I’m more interested in what the people we’re portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.
‘Dreams From My Father’ reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they’re dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.
Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn’t have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.
I don’t want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me… Just too much risk.
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
