Sentences Quotes - Page 21

• Orwell says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second - and I think this is much more important - a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Book, Men

  Source: progressive.org

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• When you have a full page of well-written dialogue that has a thought process to it, it is pretty easy to memorize. It's a lot easier to memorize than if you're in a scene and other people are talking, and you have maybe one word or one sentence that you have to interject at the right time and in a natural way.

  Sandra Bullock

  Talking, People, Pages

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• I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

  John Irving

  Writing, People, Degrees

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

  John Irving

  Uplifting, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Imagine a mosaic picture of a house in the country: lots of red and blue and yellow and black and brown and white and a dozen different shades of green tiles which make a beautiful picture if you stand back far enough. All the little red squares are true - true things, true places, true feelings. But the red squares aren't the picture. All the rest of it is lies and stories, often within the same sentence.

  Neil Gaiman

  Beautiful, Country, Lying

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• You don't need a marriage license to live with someone, to have the security of a home, to rear any number of children, to have years of companionship; it's not illegal, but the moment you want to screw somebody, you have to get a license from the state to use your genital organs -or run the risk of being charged with any number of crimes carrying sentences up to and including death. So sex is really the only sensible reason for getting married.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Running, Sex, Children

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• My name is indigenous to my country, it is not easy to pronounce, it takes effort to say correctly and I am absolutely in love with the sound of it and its meaning. Also, it's not the kind of name you baby, slip into sweet talk mid sentence, late night phone conversation, whisper into the receiver kind of name, so, of that I am glad.

  Warsan Shire

  Country, Sweet, Baby

  Source: kalamu.com

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• Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul.

  C.E. Morgan

  Art, Clever, Book

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

  Jonathan Raymond

  Real, Writing, Cameras

  "Jon Raymond’s Californian Epic". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 1, 2017.

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• When you speak a foreign language, you become someone else. If you aren't used to speaking a language, and you start speaking it again, for the first few sentences you'll find yourself in very strange shape, because you're still the person who was speaking the first language. But if you keep speaking that language, you will become the person who corresponds to it.

  Eugene Green

  Finding Yourself, Shapes, Firsts

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition. I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence. Not beautiful in the sense of "oh it's flowy" but in the sense that it really does what it's supposed to do, it what I want it to say.

  Lynne Tillman

  Beautiful, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's easy, at this point in my life, very easy to write a beautiful sentence that's meaningless. A lot of writers do that. But I don't want it to be meaningless. I want it to actually say what I want it to say, and so I'm thinking about it again and again and again.

  Lynne Tillman

  Beautiful, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Odds

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.

  Christopher Alexander

  Character, Patterns, Building

  Christopher Alexander (1979). “The Timeless Way of Building”, p.14, New York : Oxford University Press

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• If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

  John Banville

  Invention, Humans, Ifs

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• Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Life, Death, Believe

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.67, Verso

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• Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Long, Innocence, Language

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.66, Verso

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• All the lessons of history in four sentences: 1) Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power; 2) The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small; 3) The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; 4) When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

  Charles A. Beard

  Peace, Stars, Flower

  "Condensed History Lesson" by Arthur H. Secord, Readers' Digest, Volume 38, No. 226, February 1941.

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• You don't want another Enron? Here's your law: If a company, can't explain, in one sentence, what it does... it's illegal.

  Lewis Black

  Law, Doe, Want

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• Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Understanding, Selfless

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Book, Writing, Trying

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• I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Years, Alive, World

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• When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up.

  Albert Brooks

  Firsts, Thongs, Screwed Up

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Kind, Gals, Paragraph

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• Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?

  Jackson Browne

  Player, Would Be, Porsche

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