Sentences Quotes - Page 14

• The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Hate, Book, Character

  Interview with Christopher Bahn, www.avclub.com. April 5, 2007.

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• I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

  Don DeLillo

  Thinking, Facts, Dangerous

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, www.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

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• If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.

  David Mamet

  Tvs, Guides, One Sentence

  David Mamet (1988). “Speed-the-plow”, Methuen Publishing

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• It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.... Let me give you a tip on men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the...bell of an approaching looter.

  Ayn Rand

  Running, Character, Men

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.1447, Penguin

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• A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.

  Joseph Campbell

  Definitions, Mythology, One Sentence

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• I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that I, having tasted the sweetenes, l may the lesse perceave the bitternes of this miserable life.

  Elizabeth I

  Reading, Together, Gathering

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• Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.

  Richard Hugo

  Needs, Four, Ugly

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• In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.

  Confucius

  Book, Three, May

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• On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much."

  David Hockney

  Doctors, Talking, Years

  Interview with Michael Govan, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 5, 2013.

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• It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Crazy, Book, Reading

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. November 15, 2006.

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• What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.

  Yann Martel

  Book, Littles, Way

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

  Yann Martel

  Writing, Way, Sometimes

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• There is nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It's extraordinarily satisfying.

  Yann Martel

  Fall, Way, Feels

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I was raped: I said no and he wouldn't stop. I also had a scar on my back and blood coming out of my ass. To some that's just rough sex. Some would read that sentence and be turned on by that: the 51st Shade of Gay.

  Kevin Sessums

  Sex, Gay, Blood

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• It's language as a kind of structural system. A diagram of a sentence, now that seems like a kind of architectural model. I don't know how to explain it, but it would be nice to try. Why, why this fascination?

  Vito Acconci

  Nice, Trying, Fascination

  Interview with Shelley Jackson, believermag.com. January 2007.

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• A sentence from Psalm 101 has been both challenging and convicting for me: 'I will walk in my house with blameless heart' (Psalm 101-2, NIV). When God speaks to me about being more loving, this verse reminds me to make application in my family first-and then to others. It forces me to ask, 'Am I more spiritual, more loving, or more fun somewhere else? Who gets my best-my family or others?'

  Jean Fleming

  Spiritual, Fun, Heart

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• I understand that each one of us works at a different speed, and has a slightly different process. I understand that these writers are painstaking, wanting each sentence-each word-to carry weight... I know it’s not laziness, but respect for the work, and I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.

  Stephen King

  Life Is Short, Haste Makes Waste, Years

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• Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

  Tea Obreht

  Land, Sweat, Waiting

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• Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

  Marlene van Niekerk

  Writing, Exercise, Thinking

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• 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.

  Bob Shacochis

  Jobs, Trying, Structure

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• The past gives you no justice. Sentences are passed. But that doesn't mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and rail and say, 'Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.' But you're just going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn't pay. We pay. And we're all free to decide when we've had enough.

  Michael Hainey

  Taken, Mean, Past

  Michael Hainey (2013). “After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.

  Malik Bendjelloul

  Perfect, Interesting, Three

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• Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

  Carol Bly

  Writing, Thinking, Two

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• This is your court and you possess the force to celebrate the trial and convict me on the basis of your lists of accusations, the public one and the secret one, and you can dictate a sentence prepared by the political and security apparatuses that are behind this trial. But I too possess a will obtained from the justice of our cause and the determination of our people to reject any decision from this 'kangaroo court'.

  Ahmad Sa'adat

  Determination, People, Justice

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• Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."

  Bill Moyers

  Jesus, Kings, Memorable

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