Good Sentences Quotes

#1. If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

Eric Hoffer

#2. No good sentences ever include the word 'should.' I should have paid the tavern bill; now they're coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend's wife; now she devils me constantly. I should -

Cassandra Clare

#3. Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Zadie Smith

#4. Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Sylvia Plath

#5. I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Adam Ross

#6. Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

Jane Kenyon

#7. These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

Karen Thompson Walker

#8. The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

Paul Auster

#9. Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

Jonathan Franzen

#10. God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.

Sylvia Plath

#11. I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

Tom Drury

#12. When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

Holly Black

#13. See, Mary, how a good, innocent life makes friends all around. Confound it! I could make a good lesson out of it if I were a parson; but, as it is, I can't get a tail to my sentences - only I'm sure you feel what I want to say.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#14. This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don't jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

Sarah Dessen

#15. Writers are b*tc*ing about 140 characters. If you can't make a point in two sentences, how good is that book of yours really going to be?
Taken from Twitter Titters Volume 1 edited by John Rice

A.W. Tozer

#16. I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Michael Ondaatje

#17. 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

#18. I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, "Oh, we've already done something just like that."

John Sayles

#19. A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

James Patterson

#20. You don't think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It's the same kind of feeling. I'm just in it. It's not the words, it's not the sentences, I'm not aware of it. Then it's good.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#21. As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good - I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Marcel Duchamp

#22. If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

Amy Bloom

#23. Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way.

John P. Kotter

#24. I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.

Steven Millhauser

#25. Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

Ralph Fletcher

#26. Though a man should say but a few words, and his sentences and words be ever so ungrammatical, if he speaks by the power of the Holy Ghost, he will do good.

Brigham Young

#27. 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

#28. I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Anthony Bourdain

#29. Dorothy Parker once said: I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid." Upon delivering this Dot bon mot, with much waving of sparkly rings and jingly bracelets, Constance Langtry comments that she'd add a fourth: "Deft tongue. And I don't mean a good talker.

Marie Wilson

#30. Don't ever take advice from anyone who starts a sentence with, 'You may not like me for this, but it's for your own good - ' It never is.

Lois Wyse

#31. I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.

Elizabeth I

#32. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Norman Lock

#33. If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

Trenton Lee Stewart

#34. Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.

David Bowker

#35. If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.

Christopher Hitchens

#36. I'm crap at interviews. I'm just not very good at sentences.

Rupert Graves

#37. Poetry is a story
that is so good,
It doesn't need
complete sentences.

John Smyth

#38. 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.

Richard Mitchell