Top 100 On Sentence Quotes
#1. The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.
Ahmet Zappa
#2. I would prefer to have gum on my face than own up to the fact that I accidentally got gum on my face. And of course one sentence out of every ten that comes from my mouth is probably not one hundred percent true.
Alicia Thompson
#3. I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
Charles Krauthammer
#4. With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
Philip Schultz
#5. I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.
Tao Lin
#6. This is the antinomy: insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered towards the upside-down school bus I'd spied from an upstairs window.
Mitch Cullin
#9. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?
William Zinsser
#10. I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.
Jock Sturges
#11. I can't compose or play music; I'm not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me ... until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it.
Christopher Hitchens
#12. My heart is a schizophrenic. One sentence is about how I hate him. The next is about how much I love him. It goes on like that, back and forth, pacing.
Lesley Anne Cowan
#13. That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer.
Ishmael Reed
#14. Who on earth is going to use 'utilize' in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type 'z,' when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can't think of a sentence in which 'use' can't replace 'utilize.'
Susan Orlean
#15. Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books ... "
"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.
Budd Schulberg
#16. It's also obsessiveness. I'll spend a lot of time working on a single sentence, debating over a dash or a colon, etc. I want things to be perfect. I know nothing will ever be as perfect as I want it, and this is very sad, but sometimes I can get close.
Mary J. Miller
#17. The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
Alex Garland
#18. I read without a dictionary, understood some of each sentence, did not understand quite a bit of it, and was willing to read on ahead without understanding everything I had read.
John Freeman
#19. Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain
#20. I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stone cutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.
Harriet Doerr
#21. If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
Salman Rushdie
#22. Kiernan leans forward. "I'm guessing that's because you can make it work, Mr. Houdini. Maybe that's how you manage . . ." He pauses when my kick lands on his shin, but finishes the sentence anyway. ". . . some of your more elaborate escapes.
Rysa Walker
#23. My grandmother has kept all of his stuff in a drawer. This one notebook was particularly chilling. He's [howard Brookner] writing to his parents knowing he has a death sentence; his movies are how he'll live on.
Aaron Brookner
#24. When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.
Richard Russo
#26. On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.
Mary Doria Russell
#27. Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#28. can't help but smile. Sure, I have no idea how I'm going to come up with a viable experiment on emotions, but I'm not worrying about it on my own. Just the 'we' in Freya's sentence makes me feel like everything will be okay. Eventually.
Anonymous
#29. On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.
Tan Twan Eng
#30. I asked the indefatigable Betty White what she was going to do when she got home. She told me she was going to fix herself a "vodka on the rocks and eat a cold hot dog." In one sentence, she proved my theory and made me excited for my future.
Amy Poehler
#31. What sentence will you choose to impose on yourself? Are you willing to stop suffering and making yourself miserable when your sentence has expired? This would at least be a responsible way to punish yourself because it would be time-limited.
David D. Burns
#32. The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.
Bonnie Friedman
#33. Fate's sentence written on the brow no hand can e'er efface.
Bhartrhari
#35. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#36. That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that. Harper
Joe Hill
#37. The blank face of the moon looked down wistfully on the pair and tried to lean in just a little closer.
S.E. Grove
#38. When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
John Banville
#39. On Sunday, something washed up on shore.
Susan Wiggs
#40. She's on the last few chapters of some book she's been reading. She can't stay away from it. We're used to it by now. We always find her reading at the oddest times. Don't we, babe? He says the last sentence a little louder to get her attention.
Jay McLean
#41. For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next ... They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.
Augustine Of Hippo
#42. You think it amusing to have a death sentence imposed on us, sire?
Darren Shan
#43. Once, words had rendered Liesel useless, but now, when she sat on the floor, with the mayor's wife at her husband's desk, she felt an innate sense of power. It happened every time she deciphered a new word or pieced together a sentence.
Markus Zusak
#44. On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.
John Updike
#45. Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
Brian Eno
#46. Take a soldier and put him right in front of a cannon in a battle and fire it at him, and he'll go on hoping, but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier, and he'll go mad, or start to weep.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#47. Death is a huge cliff and when you are about to be thrown off it, like an Aztec sacrifice, other problems on the valley floor look very small, but once on the ground with the rest of the world they become again of dominating proportions.
Elizabeth Ironside
#48. Is it possible to get over a voice like this? Someday, I'd like to be able to hear her speak a sentence on the phone with out it making me want to hang up, get in my car, and drive as many miles as it takes to kiss her.
Nina LaCour
#49. This is serious, if Martha gets the maximum sentence on all counts, she could serve 20 years in prison. Of course, you have to take off time off for good behavior, which means 20 years in prison.
Conan O'Brien
#50. I'm not a booky actor, I don't go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I'm more interested in what the people we're portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.
Andrew Buchan
#51. There is no god." I've said that sentence on Glenn Beck's TV show in front of his live audience at his studio in the Texas Bible Belt. I've told Republicans that I like immigrants. I've told Democrats that I dig rich people. I've told sane people that I like lawyers. But
Penn Jillette
#52. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#53. I think it's important to be accurate on the level of the word, but it's also important to be accurate at the level of the sentence, at the level of the paragraph. Sometimes you lose sight of that - I remind myself to go back and read.
Ann Goldstein
#55. Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal.
Jim Butcher
#56. There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?
Colum McCann
#57. Smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#58. 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.
Mary Roach
#59. As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story
Richard Yates
#60. We were on our way to the colmado for an errand.
Junot Diaz
#61. Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
William Allen White
#62. He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. "Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It's only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.
Harper Lee
#63. Meg makes a face and lays her hand on my arm. "And why, exactly, would John want to see Eurotrash?"
"Hello?" Ryan says. "Because he's a seventeen-year old guy with normal male urges, and she's got-" He holds both hands out from his chest.
"Really pretty eyes," I complete his sentence.
Alex Flinn
#64. He wasn't quite sure when he made it, somewhere between turning on the shower and stepping in, perhaps, or pouring the milk and adding the cereal, or maybe a dozen tiny decisions had added up like letters until they finally made a word, a phrase, a sentence.
Victoria Schwab
#65. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
#66. Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
Jon Krakauer
#67. In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers.
Italo Calvino
#68. Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
#69. I think we've probably all read a word that we've never heard pronounced out loud, and we try it out in a sentence and fall on our face.
Gillian Jacobs
#70. A hundred million crystallized polio viruses could cover the period at the end of this sentence. There could be two hundred and fifty Woodstock Festivals of viruses sitting on that period-the combined populations of Great Britain and France-and you would never know it.
Anonymous
#71. Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on ...
Dennis R. Miller
#72. Nancy's last sentence is on the last page in your file. There is nothing more we know. As the sheriff might say, we don't have anything farther.
Karin Slaughter
#73. The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.
Robertson Davies
#74. I, Henricus Kramer Institoris, Judge named on behalf of the faith, declare and pronounce sentence that you standing here are impenitent heretics, and as such are to be delivered to justice,
Jeaniene Frost
#75. In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#77. There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
Vladimir Nabokov
#78. Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.
Donna Tartt
#79. At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.
Jane Smiley
#80. Seven o'clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.
Joanne Harris
#81. If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.
China Mieville
#82. Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.
James J. Kilpatrick
#83. When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.
Per Petterson
#84. Anyone that insults my country, my intelligence, my feminist ideals, all women in general, and a favorite childhood food, and refers to both himself and me in the third person in one sentence automatically gets an honorary spot on my Hate With Every Fiber of My Being For All Time list.
J.T. Geissinger
#85. I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Chang-rae Lee
#86. Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
John Jakes
#87. Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.
David Rock
#88. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. It is the most grievous sentence of the three, but it overflows with comfort. Strange is it that where misery was concentrated mercy reigned; where sorrow reached her climax weary souls find rest.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#89. It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
Soren Kierkegaard
#90. There may be a lot of things I'm not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don't treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey ...
Terry Pratchett
#91. The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth'; and 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#92. Words that add no new information or aren't repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat.
Nancy Kress
#93. Some people are born with an ear for music, some people are born with a talent for drawing, some people...have a built-in radar that tells them where a comma needs to go in a sentence.
Krystal Sutherland
#94. She stared at him and nodded. "Yes, you're right."
He cocked his head as if he couldn't hear her. "What was that?"
"You're right." She gave him a little push and he had to laugh.
"I heard you the first time," he admitted. "I just like the way that sentence sounds on your tongue.
Jill Shalvis
#95. Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.
Richard Flanagan
#96. On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#97. We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.
Esmeralda Santiago
#98. Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
Jacques Barzun
#99. No, brother-in-law, you have passed a death sentence on your people and on your Queen, your wife, the woman you have vowed to protect. And do not think your child will escape me. I will search all eternity - I will never cease until the child of my sister dies.
Darren Simon
#100. Say it," she said, and he said, "I love you. I'll always love you. Forever. It's a life sentence. Now put the damn ring on.
Jennifer Crusie
