The way you live each day is a sentence in the story of your life. Every day, you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point.
There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you sim...
'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audienc...
All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever way of working you name - methodical, haphazard, gets up early in the morning, sleeps all day, works at nig...
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
June Carter: There's too many "if"s in that sentence. Johnny Cash: There's only one actually. [shouting] Johnny Cash: There's only one "if" in that sentence, June! [looking at Jerry Lee] Johnny Cash: I-I thought it was a good point... I mean, there i...
I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.
A thousand cups of wine do not suffice when true friends meet, but half a sentence is too much when there is no meeting of minds.
Now (obviously) a sentence’s truth—even when we hold the sentence’s meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. “Brown is Prime Minister” is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there a...
I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put...
For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awak...
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, ...
Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentenc...
I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an ...
I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in." Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though... "What the hellya reading?" "Goddamn book." He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the...
When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping... all this stuff in t...
I am here wrongfully convicted and wrongfully sentenced.
Reality is a life sentence.
This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be.
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the r...
Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with paci...
