Sentences Quotes - Page 12

• What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Thinking, Relief

  "'We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was'". Interview with Hayden Bennett, believermagblog.wordpress.com. March 24, 2014.

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• 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

  Mean, Facts, Minimalist

  Interview with Lou Anders, believermag.com. April 1, 2005.

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• I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, "Do you guys hate me?"

  Mike Birbiglia

  Funny, Hate, Humor

  "Mike Birbiglia: 2". Comedy Central Presents Episode, www.imdb.com. March 03, 2006.

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• If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.

  Sam Altman

  Complicated, Ifs

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• I'll have a sentence in my head that's kind of beautiful and interesting, but I'm not sure why or where it's coming from. So it's kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it's the exact opposite of my film school experience.

  Don Hertzfeldt

  Beautiful, School, Opposites

  "Animator Don Hertzfeldt, Picturing Matchstick Men and You". Interview with Luke Y.Thompson, www.therobotsvoice.com. April 24, 2015.

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• I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

  Stanley Cavell

  Running, Philosophy, Thinking

  Source: www.bookforum.com

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• I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Focus, Musical, Important

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• I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Practice, Attention, Want

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• Definitely you don't become famous by doing something bad; that's a professional death sentence.

  Julie Payette

  Death Sentence

  "Julie Payette returns to space". Interview with Kate Fillion, www.macleans.ca. February 4, 2009.

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• It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Writing, Thinking, Long

  Source: slushpile.net

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• The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Humble, Simple, Attention

  Source: slushpile.net

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• I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Art, Book, Shoes

  Source: briansherwin-artcritic.blogspot.com

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• Sometimes if I really want to get someone's attention, I'll start a sentence with something like, "I'm not racist, but..." I say, "I'm not racist, but you look great today." They say, "That wasn't racist at all." I said, "I know. I said I'm not racist. You never listen. Typical Mexican."

  Demetri Martin

  Funny, Mexican, Typical

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• When I was younger, I dreaded having to write. I would find every possible excuse not to sit down at the typewriter (this was a long time ago). As I've gotten older, I've learned to enjoy putting sentences together, though I still believe that writing, unlike sex, is always better after you're through.

  Gustavo Perez Firmat

  Sex, Believe, Writing

  Source: www.gustavoperezfirmat.com

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• 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

  Thinking, Sight, Important

  Source: time.com

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• You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

  Ethan Canin

  Art, Differences, Fiction

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I think some of this just feels right. You're in the shower and you come up with a sentence and it's beautiful. You don't know how it's going to fit in the film, but you put it in because it feels right. This is a very long way of saying, so much of it is me feeling like I'm catching ideas rather than coming up with ideas. It's very fluid like that.

  Don Hertzfeldt

  Beautiful, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Pain, Thinking, Suffering

  "True Myth: A Conversation With Sufjan Stevens". Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. February 16, 2015.

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• I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

  Lauren Mayberry

  Reading, Thinking, Tone

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The philosophy I always have is what's the sentence that would tell me about each shot. If I can't read why the shot's there, what is the story trying to say?

  Jennifer Lee

  Philosophy, Trying, Stories

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.

  Judith Thurman

  World, Translations, Senses

  "Ask the Author Live: Judith Thurman on Laura Ingalls Wilder". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2009.

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• The first step to becoming a more peaceful person is to have the humility to admit that, in most cases, you're creating your own emergencies. Life will usually go on if things don't go according to plan. It's helpful to keep reminding yourself and repeating the sentence, "Life isn't an emergency".

  Richard Carlson

  Humility, Creating, Peaceful

  Richard Carlson (1998). “Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, and It's All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.

  Scott Adams

  Writing, Things In Life, People

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• The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Apology, Thinking, Phrases

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• To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

  Kenneth Clark

  Fall, Roles, Defying

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