Fran Lebowitz Quotes

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

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.

The Gaelic language itself depends very much on ear and rhythm, and when those who are thinking in Gaelic speak in English, they get the same rhythm.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

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

If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

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.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change.

One of the things that fascinates me is the music of speech.

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

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.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

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.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

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.