So I went in front of the judge, and I had my St. Jude prayer book in my pocket and my St. Jude medal. And I'm standing there and that judge said I was found guilty, so he sentenced me to what the law prescribed: one to 14 years.
Aaron Neville
Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.
Abbas Kiarostami
I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
Adam Grant
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.
Adam Ross
Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.
Adoniram Judson
Secondly, love and relationships are complicated. No one could ever get it right in a four-line sentence.
Adrian Grenier
The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.
Ahmet Zappa
Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.
Ai Weiwei
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.
Aidan Chambers
I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.
Aimee Bender
When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
Alan Furst
Rather than serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years or having so many other wonderful life experiences, I could have served a longer sentence in prison for some of the stupid, reckless things I did as a teenager.
Alan K. Simpson
Across the nation, there are thousands of individuals serving life or life-equivalent sentences for crimes they committed as children. This means they will likely die in prison without a chance to prove to society they are worthy of a second chance.
When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.
Alan Moore
I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.
Alan Rickman
When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up.
Albert Brooks
It is important that gang members are aware that if they engage in aggravated assault, maiming, kidnapping, or manslaughter that they will receiving a minimum sentence of 30 years.
Albert Wynn
Some BuzzFeed articles are written by smart people who use complete sentences. Some of the disposable lists are witty and appear to have taken some effort to put together.
Alex Pareene
It is not, of course, complete yet - but some sentences were understood this afternoon... I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem - and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas - and friends converse with each other without leaving home.
Alexander Graham Bell
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
Alexander Pope
I think vampires are different from human beings, but they're sentenced to eternity on this planet. They have the same confusion about love and permanence, integrity, and denial. These qualities really are the same in vampire characters as in humans. I think they're universal themes.
Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.
I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.
I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.
I guess I cringe when the discussion leads to, rather than books and sentences and characters and the stuff that writers are supposed to be concerned with, how to have an online presence and how many followers you have on Twitter. That stuff always makes me uncomfortable.
I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn't breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children's mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.
I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.
I think I am really easygoing. Well... as I was about halfway through that sentence, I thought, 'No, actually you're really picky.' But the things I ask for are really simple to do.
Addressing politics in my music' is such a phrase, a sentence on paper, that I hate. That's not really me because at the end of the day, I wasn't a political science major and I wasn't educated in that sense so I hate when people talk about things they don't know anything about.
'No' is an entire sentence in itself. No means no, and when somebody says it, you need to stop.
When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.
Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!
In my college years, I would retreat to our summer house for two weeks in June to read a novel a day. How exciting it was, after pouring my coffee and making myself comfortable on the porch, to open the next book on the roster, read the first sentences, and find myself on the platform of a train station.
Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.
Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.
If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.
My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.
Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.
I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.