Quotes About Writing Sentences

#1. I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.

Colson Whitehead

#2. Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Stanley Fish

#3. We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

Gian-Carlo Rota

#4. Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

Henry David Thoreau

#5. 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 right word to come.

Joseph Campbell

#6. I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?

Jill Talbot

#7. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

#8. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#9. 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

#10. The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.

Muriel Barbery

#11. I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.

Mitch Albom

#12. I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

Larry Wall

#13. I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul.

Chloe Thurlow

#14. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.

Scott Berkun

#15. I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

Tom Robbins

#16. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

James Patterson

#17. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.

Dan Alatorre

#18. 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

#19. I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.

Chloe Thurlow

#20. Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

Stanley Fish

#21. 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

#22. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.

Betsy Byars

#23. Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

William H Gass

#24. Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

James Patterson

#25. Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.

Sol Stein

#26. Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

Lauren Oliver

#27. Me to Comma: I will never get use to you wanting to butt your way into my sentences
even if you're right.

Buffy Andrews

#28. As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that nanosecond of emotion.

Trinity Jones

#29. All his elaborated arguments and beautiful sentences turned, under the influence of alcohol, into dust and slipped between his nicotine-stained fingers.

Ole H.

#30. Writing a song is almost like cheating-writing because you don't have to finish your sentences, you don't have to use any punctuation, no one's going to edit your work. It's so wide open. People just grunt and that's a song. You can kind of do anything.

Mirah

#31. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#32. If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

John Irving

#33. An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

Alain De Lille

#34. How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

Joyce Carol Oates

#35. When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

John Banville

#36. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?

Jonathan Franzen

#37. People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

Stanley Fish

#38. The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born - without the luxury of time.

Julia Cameron

#39. 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

#40. I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right.

John McPhee

#41. Writing isn't an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true. Anyway,

Magda Szabo

#42. Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

Barrett Wendell

#43. Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

Amy Bloom

#44. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#45. I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#46. I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#47. {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

#48. 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

#49. Read as widely as possible, and write every day, even if it's as little as three sentences.

William Shunn

#50. I think sometimes we give people a lot of credit just because they're writing nice sentences even if it isn't adding up to much.

James Patterson

#51. Words are beads on the strings of sentences. So make a beautiful necklace!

Aneta Cruz

#52. Writing is the act of creation. Put words on a page, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to seven-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don't give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn't control him.

Chuck Wendig

#53. A clear sentence is no accident.

William Zinsser

#54. I don't experience writer's block, I only have periods of severe writer's diarrhoea; an incoherent mess of unfitting words placed in random sentences. Luckily, I can usually separate the shit from "the shit" later on.

Kevin Focke

#55. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

Richard Hugo

#56. We have some writers so abstruse and deep that they drown themselves in their fathomless sentences.

Josh Billings

#57. Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

Anne McCaffrey

#58. I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

Lydia Davis

#59. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

Jacqueline Woodson

#60. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

Jonathan Lethem

#61. You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences.

Harper Lee

#62. Words become sentences, twisted, difficult/The story weaves itself, always noisiest at night/As herds of words won't stop ...
Wildebeest of Words/Breathe In

Eileen Granfors

#63. Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.

Stanley Hauerwas

#64. 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

#65. There's writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

Judith Briles

#66. Years ago when I got stuck, I'd start twirling my hair. That's not possible anymore. I can't prove the relationship between writing and hair loss, but I think I pulled out a fair amount trying to work on certain sentences.

Eric Schlosser

#67. Being a journalist influenced me as a novelist. I mean, a lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

Kurt Vonnegut

#68. I love the writing. I love the idea of typing and seeing it on the computer and printing it out myself and, you know, moving sentences around. I like that.

Carol Burnett

#69. A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic

#70. Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Barry Hannah

#71. Despite what you may have learned last month, sustained writing is best accomplished as part of a balanced lifestyle, one that includes things like grocery shopping and speaking in complete sentences with your significant other. No

Chris Baty

#72. I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.

Pamela Frankau

#73. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Meg Rosoff

#74. 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

#75. I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

Ben Gibbard

#76. Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are ... the process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.

Barack Obama

#77. Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

Clifford Geertz

#78. I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul.

Chloe Thurlow

#79. 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

#80. Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

Andy Rooney

#81. The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

Edward Hirsch

#82. When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

E.L. Doctorow

#83. I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

George Saunders

#84. Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.

Pamela Morris

#85. Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.

Bonnie Friedman

#86. 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

#87. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.

Jonathan Sacks

#88. By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.

Richelle E. Goodrich

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

Sylvia Plath

#90. These letters, and then words, and then sentences, that are written on your manuscript are all answers to questions. Writing is nothing but a long journey of confronting questions. Accomplishment will bring you peace, but will not make a writer of you.

Rabisankar Bal

#91. 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

#92. I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

Martin Amis

#93. We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words
and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

Thomas Newkirk

#94. There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. 'I heartily endorse the Conservative Party' would be one. 'I look forward to Justin Bieber's new record' would be another.

John Niven

#95. I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.

Cynthia Voigt

#96. The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

George Saunders

#97. I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

Lawrence Block

#98. For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

Rebecca Solnit

#99. 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

#100. Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

Terry Pratchett