A Quote by Gordon Lish

Don't have stories; have sentences.

Gordon Lish

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Sentences Stories

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Gordon Lish
American - Novelist
Born: February 11, 1934

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

Jacqueline Woodson

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.

Michael Ende

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

Karen Thompson Walker

Just as you can practice three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Stanley Fish

My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.

Karen Thompson Walker

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

Noam Chomsky

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

Jhumpa Lahiri

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

W. Somerset Maugham

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

David Crystal

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses were passed by Congress in the 1980s as part of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, sentences that have helped to fuel our nation's prison boom and have also greatly aggravated racial disparities, particularly in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine.

Michelle Alexander

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.

Paul Auster

Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article.

Bob Frankston

The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

Marshall McLuhan

It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.

Douglas Coupland

I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

George Saunders

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

James Patterson

A Quote by Gordon Lish

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