Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'
The reduction in gun violence President Obama claims to desperately want comes from law enforcement and prosecution, not from political rhetoric, lectures and sentence commutations for federal firearm law offenders and felons.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
What I don't like about Washington, if we say one syllable or one sentence, or this guy said something bad about me, then, all of a sudden, they have to be my mortal enemy. I don't think that's how it works in American business.
What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.
If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.
The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.
The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader's mind. It has, in fact, the last word.
I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.
Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy.
I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.
In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.
Anything about Iraq is a death sentence at the box office... You can't make movies about an unpopular war while the war is still going on - people don't want to pay to get depressed, though they sometimes will go to movies to get educated.
Have you ever thought how one phrase, one sentence, one troll can ruin someone's entire life? Why do we interfere in their private lives? Think of others as our properties? And say whatever bitterness is in our hearts without thinking twice?
I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.
I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.
I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.
If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.
Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person's life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader's style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
I realised I had an issue with my mobile phone use when a friend started explaining the virtues of the Fast 800 diet and, while still engaged in the conversation, I pulled out my phone and ordered the book before they had finished their sentence.
I think it's hard to describe my style in one sentence. It depends on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I'll dress more street; other times, I'll dress more classy. I have so many different ways that I can express myself, so my style is pretty versatile.
In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.
An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.
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.
If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.
By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained.
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.
I am my own worst critic, and I look at 'Death Sentence' now, and I go, 'Oh wow, I have really come a long way.' In terms of a filmmaker, I feel like my filmmaking language has really matured.
You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.
I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
Praise the Lord, but do me a favor, don't ever say 'Stephen Baldwin' and 'ministry' in the same sentence. I make movies, and in Hollywood, that's career suicide.
The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn't find it, but we think we're hot on the trail.
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.
Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!
I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.
Vigorous writing is concise. 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.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.