First Sentences Quotes

#1. First sentences are doors to worlds.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#2. One of my favorite first sentences of a
book is from Rebecca, Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#3. What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

#4. I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn't even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

Heather Sellers

#5. There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Nancy Kress

#6. I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Henry Miller

#7. I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

Betsy Byars

#8. You're going the right direction. No one does anything perfectly the first time. It's going to be okay. No one could have said anything better to me in that instant. Those three simple sentences set my soul at ease.

Jamie McGuire

#9. Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.

Erma Bombeck

#10. They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.

Janet Frame

#11. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Ernest Hemingway,

#12. I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Karen Thompson Walker

#13. Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#14. I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

Scott Westerfeld

#15. People in America and Hollywood are very good at pronouncing my name, to begin with. Socially, they're very adept at listening to somebody's name and repeating it, cleverly in the first couple of sentences so the name sticks to begin with.

Ioan Gruffudd

#16. I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.

Gary Soto

#17. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do

William Zinsser

#18. If you're going to read this, don't bother.

Chuck Palahniuk

#19. I am a big Brian Eno fan - the first few Brian Eno records are just absolute gibberish and he came up with a lot of lyrics by writing down loads and loads of random sentences and streams, and I find meaning in that music, even though he'd probably say it's absolute gibberish.

Jay Watson

#20. We are but beginners now in spiritual education; for although we have learned the first letters of the alphabet, we cannot read words yet, much less can we put sentences together; but as one says, "He that has been in heaven but five minutes, knows more than the general assembly of divines on earth.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#21. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Charlotte Bronte

#22. Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor's voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe's tragic poem.

Ian McEwan

#23. I have many stories which don't make it to the computer. When I put it into the computer I make some changes and often add a few sentences here and there. I like the typewriter for first drafts because it means you can't change anything right away, you just have to put it all down.

Arthur Bradford

#24. President Obama has reduced the sentences of 22 federal prisoners who were arrested for drug-related crimes - eight of whom were serving life sentences. It marks the first time someone has said 'Thanks Obama' but actually meant it.

Jimmy Fallon

#25. 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.

Walter Kirn

#26. I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'

Penelope Cruz

#27. When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight.

Aruni Kashyap

#28. Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head - by reading.

Jim Trelease

#29. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.

Herman Koch

#30. Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.

William Gibson

#31. As a writer, you look for someplace to start. Once you have a beginning and you've written the first two sentences, nothing else will ever change it.

Ronee Blakley

#32. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

Ben Lerner

#33. Actors don't need a lot of talk beyond the first few sentences. They may say they don't draw on their own life, but all actors do.

Edoardo Ponti

#34. They murdered him.

Robert Cormier

#35. The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#36. Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#37. If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

Albert Ellis

#38. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

Bertrand Russell

#39. I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.

Rae Hachton

#40. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Nick Cave

#41. Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.

Herbert Bayard Swope

#42. On opening sentences: "If in the first chapter a hurricane is going to blow down an oak tree which falls through the kitchen roof, there's no need to first describe the kitchen."

James Thayer

#43. I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.

Bryce Courtenay

#44. Do you want anything from the shop?" definitely ranked as one of my top three favorite sentences of all time. It's right up there with, "School's been cancelled because of the weather" and "Would you like me to go down on you first?

L. H. Cosway

#45. Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.

Winston Churchill

#46. After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.

Michael Cox

#47. 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 author.

Henning Mankell