Sentences Quotes - Page 16

• A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Stupid, Writing, Simple

  Kurt Vonnegut (2016). “If This Isn't Nice What Is? (Much) Expanded Second Edition: The Graduation Speeches and Other Words to Live By”, p.112, RosettaBooks

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• I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form.

  Andy Warhol

  Art, Style, Listening

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• Living in the now is freedom from all problems connected with time. You ought to remember that sentence, you ought to memorize it, and ought to take it out, you ought to practice it, you ought to apply it. And most of all, you ought to rejoice in it because you have just heard how not to be wretched, miserable you any more but to be a brand new, and forever brand new man or woman.

  Vernon Howard

  Men, Practice, Forever

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• I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Suffering, Novel, Findings

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.151, Harvard University Press

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• Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?

  Salman Rushdie

  Perfect, Closure, Speak

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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• Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

  William Zinsser

  Strong, Glory, Abraham

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• All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

  William Zinsser

  Fall, Writing, Together

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• Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

  William Zinsser

  Adjectives, Soil, Lagoons

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• One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.

  William Zinsser

  Mother, Children, Father

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• The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.

  William Zinsser

  Important, Firsts, Reader

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• The longer and the deeper the thought, the shorter the sentence of wisdom will be.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Deeper

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• The most crucial thing is to learn the craft: how to string sentences together, how to make your dialogue sound like real people, how to properly pace a story, how to develop interesting characters.

  Stephen Coonts

  Real, Character, People

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• If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

  Tyler Cowen

  Simple, Ties, Innovation

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• On the air, it's as if somebody draws a heavy drape to block any bias. I don't even feel it inside. It's the same curtain that keeps you from swearing. I've known broadcasters who can't get one sentence out in normal conversation without being profane, and yet, they can go on the air and talk for three hours and never slip once.

  Dick Enberg

  Block, Air, Normal

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• And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.

  Terence McKenna

  Art, Believe, Space

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• Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.

  Elias Canetti

  Lasts, Speak

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• I understand the climate we live in and why people are curious. But it's just tough and almost emotionally violent - for anyone, I think - to see your personal life summarized in a sentence.

  Ryan Reynolds

  Thinking, People, Climate

  "Ryan Reynolds Talks Blake Lively, Having A Big Family" by Cavan Sieczkowski, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 8, 2013.

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• We're not ignored by The Guinness Book Of Records, but we've been largely ignored by the media during our lifetime. If you read any article, no mention is ever made of Pink Floyd. We're never included in the same sentences as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. I wrote 'The Wall' as an attack on stadium rock - and there's Pink Floyd making money out of it by playing it in stadiums! Pathetic. They spoiled my creations.

  Roger Waters

  Wall, Book, Rocks

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• I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

  Richard Dawkins

  Communication, Thinking, Mediums

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• I think that I prefer to shoot characters even if they are not good people. I don't think that cinema is a place where you can do sentences like in a court.

  Miguel Gomes

  Character, Thinking, People

  "The Epic Miguel Gomes". Interview with Colleen Kelsey, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 3, 2015.

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• The great thing about Coulson is that he's a little bit like a party game, where the next person who gets ahold of him gets to write another sentence. I'm constantly learning more and more about the guy.

  Clark Gregg

  Party, Writing, Games

  Source: collider.com

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• The energy is important. It's the rebirth of the character. Even more than the sentence itself, it's the energy that has to come through. It's really 'Thank you!'

  Jean Dujardin

  Character, Important, Energy

  Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 23, 2011.

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• When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!

  Robert McKee

  Smart, Book, People

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• The only antidote to anger is to eliminate the internal sentence: "If only you were more like me."

  Wayne Dyer

  Antidote, Internals, Like Me

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• A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity...he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.

  John Quincy Adams

  Writing, Men, Names

  "Rocking the Vote, in the 1820s and Now" by Jon Meacham, www.nytimes.com. October 21, 2010.

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