#sentences

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. ↗

— Joan Didion

#book #constantly #day #every #every day

Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have. ↗

— E. L. Doctorow

#brain #line #make #music #rhythm

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences. ↗

— E. L. Doctorow

#face #i #like #look #off

I have two books that were published quite some time ago. I start to read about three sentences. I have to close it. I am so self-conscious. Who did I think I was? ↗

— Patty Duke

#ago #am #books #close #did

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#because #book #create #different #effects

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

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#down #even #five #four #i

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

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. ↗

— William Strunk, Jr.

#drawing #lines #machine #paragraph #parts