It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
A. N. Wilson
As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'
Alain de Botton
The things I tend to do best are the things that are the most overtly emotional, whether it's sentimental or whether it's celebratory or whether it's conflicted.
Alan Menken
I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
Alexander Payne
I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.
Alexi Zentner
When I see sentimental scenes, I get emotional and tears start flowing from my eyes.
Ali
When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.
Alice Hamilton
My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
Alice McDermott
I may seem a tough guy, but I'm also very sentimental.
Alvin Leung
Strangely enough, my favorite airport is Logan Airport in Boston - but largely for sentimental reasons. My first real summer job was working as a journeyman for the airport's resident maintenance crew - a small army of union electricians, plumbers, and carpenters.
Amor Towles
From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.
Andrew Davies
It may sound amazing to people today, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were considered by - how can I put it? - the sort of opinion-making tastemakers and everything to be 'off the scale as sentimental.'
Andrew Lloyd Webber
I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
Andrew Motion
I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.
Andrew Sean Greer
Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.
Anita Brookner
I'm crazy, but I'm serious. I'm sentimental, but I'm, like, really hard, too. I just want people to understand that I have all these sides inside me.
Anitta
I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I'm used to not being taken seriously, but only the 'light-hearted' Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the 'deeper' Anne is too weak.
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
People relate to things that feel real to them. All the good, happy, over-sexed and moneyed endings on TV are not the way most of us feel in our lives. The success of 'E.R.,' I think, is not relying on overly sentimental stories that are solved where people's lives wrap up nicely with happy endings.
I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.
I am a sentimental guy, and occasionally, that lump in my throat when I speak has stopped my tongue from working.
In dread fear of sentimentality, another thing true is not said-that for its staff the paper is a source of pride and, I do believe, an object of affection and-yes, love.
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.
I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
I don't have any sentimental notion about how people are going to remember me.
Pixar make kids' movies, but there are jokes in there for adults, and it never gets too sentimental.
I think sometimes good sentimentality is fun when it's balanced.
I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit - audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.
I have a sentimental feeling for my very first cover I was on - it was 'Bazaar' Magazine.
I guess I've gotten older and more sentimental, and I've realized that the love song is just the modern equivalent of a devotional.
Well, I'm just a really sentimental person, and I just get leveled by things so easily, like from films, to personal interactions, to memories, to music.
I'm not a very sentimental person, so you're not going to find schmaltzy scenes in my movies.
I get very sentimental, I get very nostalgic, and when I live in a place, I instantly put down way too many roots.
If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.
My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.
Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.
I was living out on Long Island in Baldwin, New York when Hurricane Sandy hit. With the storm surge, the whole first floor of our house was under about three feet of water. We lost a lot of valuable stuff - sentimental stuff like pictures and Christmas ornaments. Nobody expected flooding that bad.
I don't think it's good to be sentimental, so I try not to be.
Listening to Nat Cole prompted me to sing sentimental songs with distinct diction.
My books are all fantastically sentimental.
Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.
Everything gets to me. I'm very sentimental.
It's good for you to see your friends arrested. It hardens you. There's no place in our New Order for sentimentalists.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
