Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.
On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
I'd be honored to be in the same sentence as Tom Hardy. I've been a twin since the day I was born - fraternal, but we look a lot alike - so I've already been mixed up with another man my entire life.
I wish I could undo what I did at Enron but I can't. I understand that I deserve punishment. Your honor, I accept the prison sentence that you are about to impose and will serve it without bitterness.
I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.
I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.
I'm not a booky actor, I don't go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I'm more interested in what the people we're portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.
If you listen to Donald Trump speak on almost any given issue, you will hear him take both sides of that issue - in the same sentence, sometimes. It's very, very hard to pin him down in any specific way.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.
The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
Copywriting probably did make me a commercial writer. Nobody wants to read advertising copy, so you have to keep it punchy; you almost have trick them into reading it. You have to make every sentence work.
'Reno 911: Miami!' is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews - good and mostly bad - nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that's more awkward.
The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
My style is difficult to contain in a sentence; it's ever evolving. Generally I'm drawn to clean cuts and avoid patterns. I tend to choose structure and block colors, but these are all just loose guidelines.
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
I always enjoy ballet when you can read the situation very precisely, when I could tell you exactly which sentence that person is saying to that person even when they're not speaking and just moving their hand.
Our Japanese fans don't speak English primary. They'll translate a sentence before coming and say something like, 'Thank you for coming to our country.' It's like, you're welcome. Thanks for coming to our show!
The fact that anyone lives in America is the single reason poverty is never a death sentence, and transforms it instead into - at worst - an obstacle on the path to a better life and road to freedom and success.
I suggest we bring some normality back to this country and say if you are carrying a knife, there must be zero tolerance. If it was up to me, everyone caught with a knife would get an automatic ten year sentence.
Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer.
I think, in terms of looking at the trajectory and being around some of the same people, it's certainly flattering words, but I definitely have not done enough to be mentioned in the same sentence as Coach Payton.
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
It's funny, though, speaking of fathers and sons, because me and John Goodman played father and son, like, five or six years ago in the film 'Death Sentence,' and I got back with him again in 'Inside Llewyn Davis.'
Even people who despise ego and aspire to humility, who plan to be humble once they are successful, are worried that actually enacting those beliefs would sentence them to a life of obscurity or weakness or failure.
I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him.
Working with children is a whole other ball game. They're like little animals. You have to keep the camera turned on them all the time. Sometimes it takes a 41-minute take to get one sentence out in a believable way.
Perhaps the majority of human beings never think of standing by themselves, and choosing their own employments, till the sentence has been regularly promulgated to them, 'It is time for you to take care of yourself.'
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Hank Williams seemed, like, so total to me, so committed to the lyric. He would actually rip the ends of the words off at the, you know - the end of the sentence. It sounded like he'd bite into the word and rip it off.
Someone pointed out that Dick Enberg and Curt Gowdy are the only two ever to call a Super Bowl and a Final Four. So I'll be the third. I get a kick out of putting my name in the same sentence as those other two giants.
Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.
The original 'Hobbit' was never intended to have a sequel - Bilbo 'remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long': a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.
I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Doing a thing by law, or according to law, is only carrying the law into execution. And punishing a man by, or according to, the sentence or judgment of his peers, is only carrying that sentence or judgment into execution.
When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
My grandfather used to write one sentence every day in his journal: 'I love Anne more than ever today.' I think that was his meditation - keeping him in his marriage, and also his appreciation for it. It was very touching.
You can be predisposed genetically, but it's not a sentence. I'm genetically predisposed, but I manage my weight. The root of obesity, though, is usually emotional. The poor habits are a symptom of a deeper emotional issue.
I used to have 20/20 vision, believe it or not; that's gone because of all the reading I did when I wasn't supposed to, reading in the back of a car, waiting for each street light to go past so I could grab another sentence.
It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.
A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.