Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
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.
Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.
I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
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.
I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.
I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.
Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.
If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.
When faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure, write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.
Because of the vulgar advent, I decided to give way and, by dark and cryptic sentences, tell of the causes of the future mutation of mankind; especially the most urgent ones, and the ones I perceived, and in a manner that would not upset their fragile sentiments.
I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
When I signed onto 'Superman,' editors Matt Idelson and Wil Moss gave me a rough outline that JMS had turned in for the remaining issues of the 'Grounded' arc, which amounted to a couple of sentences for each issue, spelling out in general terms where the issue would take place geographically, specific guest stars, things like that.