Sentence Construction Quotes

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

I once asked him what came at the end of the sentence... and he said "parole".

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.

I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

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

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

Pronouns are only useful when you combine them with other words. I have a few I can give you, if you're at a loss.

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.

Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Constructing passive sentences is a way of concealing your own testicles.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.