Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
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.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Transgender people frequently face bias in court and are assigned unsupportive public defenders, factors which lead to more extreme sentences and longer incarcerations.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
Some BuzzFeed articles are written by smart people who use complete sentences. Some of the disposable lists are witty and appear to have taken some effort to put together.
The pressure isn't on my brain, but on my mouth. I realized Sam Malone said very little, he spoke in little sentences. Which is much more comfortable for me for some reason.
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 don't believe we should allow thousands of violent felons to be released early from prison, nor do I believe we should reduce sentences for violent offenders in the future.
Particularly [Alfred] Hitchcock, who takes his time with everything he says. There's a controlling way in how he speaks because he takes his time to finish all his sentences.
I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.
Knut Hamsun's writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.
I have studied all the sciences and all the major religions and can sum it up in one sentence. We become, have and attract what we think about and act upon correctly the most.
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.
If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences.
I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.
I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.
Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. 'I heartily endorse the Conservative Party' would be one. 'I look forward to Justin Bieber's new record' would be another.
The unsaid is a powerful tool. It invites the reader into the narrative, filling in gaps, interpreting silences and half-finished sentences, and seeing the hidden fear in someone's eye.
I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like... ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.
For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.
If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.
When you're on a submarine you're usually underwater for months at a time, and you don't get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they're maybe two sentences. They're very short.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
What to do about these increases in crime? Plenty of laws already exist to punish violent criminals, and research questions the level of correlation between longer sentences and lower crime rates.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.
When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.
But if you know that something has been really vicious, you don't read it, you don't let it into your head. What's damaging is when sentences go through your head and you burn with the injustice of it.
It's a knack that my mother doesn't have. The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn't string two sentences together. It's about the only thing she can't do.
My relationship with my brothers... it's almost weird. We've never fought, we finish each other's sentences, but not in a creepy way. We talk about the things that we love and share music with each other.
I sum up the prospects for 1967 in three short sentences. We are back on course. The ship is picking up speed. The economy is moving. Every seaman knows the command at such a moment: 'steady as she goes'.
It's a complicated issue, and you can't boil it down in a tweet... two sentences cannot sum up the whole gun debate... The minute you try to talk about it honestly and openly, you get raked over the coals.
The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
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.
There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.
Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.
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.
If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.
Throughout school I studied in Tamil medium schools but it was only when I got to college that I realized that not learning English was a great disadvantage as I didn't understand even the simplest of sentences.
I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?
The cliche of call-centre work is that it's mainly older people who will stay on the line to talk to you. Whether through loneliness or good manners, they tend to allow you to finish your sentences, hear you out.
I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.