Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.
I would love for the time to come where somebody can talk about me and not have to talk about Britney and Christina in the same sentence.
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
People think I'm clever, which is hilarious. I'm like, 'When did this happen? People used to think I couldn't string a sentence together.'
Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.
I swear, if anyone near me even so much as whispers the sentence 'Women probably don't want to direct,' my fist will fly as a reflex action.
Shyne's my man. I've been talking to him and I was talking to him all through his prison sentence. He's always remained a loyal person to me.
Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
Xi has made plain that he will no longer tolerate hearing the words 'human rights' spoken out loud in the same sentence with the word 'China.'
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!'
I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.
When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
I work a lot on words, so if I hear a word or see a word or a phrase or a sentence that someone says to me it just immediately sparks a concept.
When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.
When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.
John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.
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.
The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.
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.
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.
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.'
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.
I find that when I write for children, I am more hopeful, less cynical. I don't use different words or a different sentence structure. I just hope more.
Everybody appears to look down on Bieber. No person able to write a grammatical sentence about Justin Bieber actually thinks him worthy of the sentence.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Keeping a habit, in the smallest way, protects and strengthens it. I write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to keep my habit of daily writing strong.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
You know you're a bigot when you can't take out the word 'Muslim' from a sentence you stated and replace it with 'Jew' and still have it be socially acceptable.
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
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.
Praise the Lord, but do me a favor, don't ever say 'Stephen Baldwin' and 'ministry' in the same sentence. I make movies, and in Hollywood, that's career suicide.
I believe UNAIDS' provocative leadership has been critical in addressing the AIDS epidemic and converting it from a death sentence to a chronic health condition.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
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.
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.
I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'