Quotes About Sentence Structure

#1. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.

Cassie Nichols

#2. I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

China Mieville

#3. Your passion for words & sentence structure should equal a painter's passion for color & brushstroke.

Andrew McAleer

#4. I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#5. Sentence structure is innate, but whining is acquired.

Woody Allen

#6. With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

James Thurber

#7. Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

Ronald Kessler

#8. If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

Poppy Z. Brite

#9. I would fain grow old learning many things.

Plato

#10. The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Noam Chomsky

#11. The Unicorn Sonata ... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.

Peter S. Beagle

#12. Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

Stephen Shore

#13. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

Winston Churchill

#14. We never thought it would be something everyone would listen to. We never thought people who listen to Britney Spears would run to listen to it. It was intended for people on the fanatical side of production and hi-fi.

Wayne Coyne

#15. The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.

John Rhys-Davies

#16. What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

Lynne Truss

#17. Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it.

D. A. Pennebaker

#18. The worst of slaves is he whom passion rules.

Rupert Brooke

#19. My style is difficult to contain in a sentence; it's ever evolving. Generally I'm drawn to clean cuts and avoid patterns. I tend to choose structure and block colors, but these are all just loose guidelines.

Daphne Guinness

#20. I've never been in a single accident - basic precognition takes care of that - and the cops all know my car well enough to leave me alone when I'm bending the laws of physics and traffic to get somewhere.

Lilith Saintcrow

#21. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Joan Didion

#22. You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence.

Stephen Fry

#23. Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?

Susan Howe

#24. Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

#25. It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it.

Antoine D'Agata