Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail. — Clive James Copy Share Image
Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle… — Constance Hale Copy Share Image
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human… — James Dickey Copy Share Image
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or… — Ethan Canin Copy Share Image
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we… — Stanley Fish Copy Share Image
Aaron Persky who is the judge who really I think it's fair to say there is a mob seeking to recall him… — Dahlia Lithwick Copy Share Image
I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word.… — Harriet Doerr Copy Share Image
That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my… — Charles Bukowski Copy Share Image
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks… — Bill Bryson Copy Share Image
I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page… — Neil Gaiman Copy Share Image
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no… — William Strunk, Jr Copy Share Image
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the… — John Irving Copy Share Image
You don't want atheism shoved down your throat? OK. We will stock knocking on doors spreading our 'Truth,' and having tax-exempt organizations… — David G. McAfee Copy Share Image
What the devil to do with the sentence "Who the devil does he think he's fooling?" You can't write "Whom the devil- ". — Paul Goodman Copy Share Image
The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?' — Stanley Fish Copy Share Image
The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria - anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor. — W. P. Kinsella Copy Share Image
When we're rational about rule-breaking we set a limit. You don't get 30 years in prison for a traffic ticket. But sometimes… — David D. Burns Copy Share Image
Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
It can be a simple sentence that makes one single point and you build for that. You zero in on one moment… — Jack Lemmon Copy Share Image
Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to… — Catherine Brady Copy Share Image
Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action. — Kurt Vonnegut Copy Share Image
