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.
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style...
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
One wrong move, one bad rumor, one mistake, and it's social death row. I'm the latest to be sentenced. Move out of the way, everyone. Dead girl walking. -Riley
It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.
Positive thinkers use sentences like “I can do it”; “I am qualified for it”; they think of things as possible.
Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.
Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.
I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
I cannot imagine a sentence more severe than a person limited not by his or her own abilities but by the opinions and expectations of others. And having been made to organize in such a way, comes the remuneration, but no penance or escape.
There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
Never fear Death for you will feel aroused by his sleep. Never cheat death or he will slap you with a sentence of misery for the defeat.
When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.
People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.
Here's my using dickwad in a sentence. Greg is such a dickwad, he locks his car in the Pagoda Pizza parking lot. (No. That isn't a real Vocab word.)
Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.
Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.
A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.
