Best writing & sentences Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.”

Ifs Knows Needs Writing Firsts Order Waiting Hours Known Fate Written Pages Sentences Invisible Chapters Invisible Things

Author:Lynda Barry

“Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.”

Writing Book Whole Ambition Pages Sentences Cursed

Author:Joseph Joubert

“In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.”

Writing Fiction Rewards Sentences Writing Fiction

Author:Amy Tan

“It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.”

Giving Writing Trying Reason Use Sound Style Perception Ordinary Sentences Objectives Reason Why Faithful Paragraph Transmit Being Faithful Synonym

Author:Martin Amis

“You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.”

“The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.”

“Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.”

Source: Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected

“Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.”

Writing Trying Stories Sentences Stop Trying

Author:James Patterson

“Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.”

“I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.”

People Ifs Thinking Writing Sometimes Lasts Born Mines One Day Understood Praise Affection Delight Sentences Immortality Understand Me True Family

Author:Fernando Pessoa

“I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.”

Writing Ends Joy Artist Reading Behinds Scene Pages Paint Delight Sentences Paradox Behind The Scenes Palette

Book:The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

Source: The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.”

Writing Trying Poetry Dies Language Poet Standards Sentences

Author:Janet Fitch

“I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.”

Writing Firsts Wanted Beautiful Fiction College Sentences Writing Fiction

Author:Karen Thompson Walker

“I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.”

Needs Feels Writing Play Moving Form Next Process Sentences Satisfying Editing Puzzles Edits The Next One One For Me

Author:Karen Thompson Walker

“You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.”

Thinking Writing Trying Wells Kind Play Feelings Sentences

Author:Karl Ove Knausgard

“When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.”

Writing Facts Audience Mass Sentences

Author:Michael Hastings

“I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.”

Thinking Writing Doe Hard Certain Discipline Intellectual Structure Sentences Mapping

Author:Daniel Alarcon

“The one affectation I have forced on the publisher... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter.”

Knows Writing Use Seems Clear Letters Mark Scripts Sentences Foolish Devices Spells Publishers Confusing Printed Punctuation Punctuation Marks

Author:Andy Rooney

“My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, "Don't write that," or "Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats."”

Men Giving Should Writing Sometimes Voice Four Terrible Giving Up Cat Critical Sentences Coffee Awake Pet Dragons Eggs Breakfast Clicks Best Times Disclosure

Author:Jeff VanderMeer

“Letters are meaningless unless put together correctly. Words are worthless unless backed by truth. Sentences are handed out and judged accordingly, but only genuinely honest men or women can create writings that change the world forever.”

Men World Writing Together Forever Honest Letters Sentences Changing The World Meaningless Judged Worthless Honest Man

Author:Paul Morabito

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