#sentences

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey. ↗

— John Irving

#atmosphere #begin #convey #ending #happens

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! ↗

— William James

#anything #believes #cheap #discourse #faith

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma. ↗

— Joey Santiago

#comma #end #exclamation #mark #nice

In Washington, I found myself as a 31-year-old in a room with the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense, and I was unfazed by it. But get me around a rock star I grew up with and I have trouble completing sentences. ↗

— Joe Scarborough

#completing #defense #found #get #grew

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do. ↗

— Peter Straub

#henry #henry james #i #i write #james

I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. ↗

— Nick Cave

#opening-lines #opening-sentences #death

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't. ↗

— Joan Didion

#arrangement #because #early #eleven #hemingway

It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth. ↗

— Lester Bangs

#run-on-sentences #music

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#first-sentence

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation? ↗

— Lewis Carroll

#first-sentence