Dennis Lehane Quotes

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

I ain't no author, man... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

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 am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

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.