Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
Mainly, when I ran into Emmylou Harris, that was it, you know? We could finish each other's sentences musically, and personally, too. We have a very shared, similar sensibility. And that was a friendship that really opened up a tremendous number of musical doors for me.
The federal sentencing guidelines should be revised downward. By contrast to the guidelines, I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences. In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise and unjust.
A preposition is a word You mustn't end a sentence with!
As with editing, I think my strength as a writer is structure. It's not a skill that's much discussed when we discuss fiction, or not as much as language or character development anyway, but it's the first thing I determine before I begin writing - not just books, but anything. I think I know how to pace a narrative well. I think I'm aware of repetition, that I try to create different kinds of sentences as often as I can. Those are all things I learned from magazine editing.
Don't say hit and mountain in the same sentence.
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.
We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.
Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.
Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence.
I drank that sentence and began to glow.
The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.
Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.
Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?
Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation.