A Quote by Will Self

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

Will Self

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Accurate Affecting Always Attempt Beautifully Between Content Dreadful Fail Falling Feel Mental Page Seems Sentences Seriously Short Write

Quote Author

Will Self
English - Author
Born: September 26, 1961

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Christopher Hitchens

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~

Dr. Seuss

...he makes me feel out of control and out of my head. He is exhilarating and terrifying. I see and feel him everywhere, and I'm always grasping for equilibrium even when he's not there... I feel like I'm always falling in love, falling and falling and falling.

Megan McCafferty

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

George Saunders

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Sylvia Plath

If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences.

Walter Kirn

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Stephen King

Especially with Instagram, I feel reluctant to make all the photos beautiful because I don't necessarily want to send this message that life is perfect and your avocado toast is always going to be beautifully lit. I want readers to feel like the Man Repeller page is real and kind of dirty. Messy.

Leandra Medine

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

Whit Stillman

So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

Lorin Stein

Why are tall guys always attracted to short women? Not just moderately short women, either... Tiny women. Polly Pockets. The tallest guys always-always-always go for the shortest girls. Always. It's like they're so infatuated with their own height that they want to be with someone who makes them feel even taller. Someone they can tower over. A little doll that will make them feel even bigger and stronger.

Rainbow Rowell

Mixtapes are always small scale to me - they never get taken seriously, and they're always short-lived.

ASAP Ferg

Failure is an inescapable part of life and a critically important part of any successful life. We learn to walk by falling, to talk by babbling, to shoot a basket by missing, and to color the inside of a square by scribbling outside the box. Those who intensely fear failing end up falling short of their potential. We either learn to fail or we fail to learn.

Tal Ben-Shahar

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.

Jami Attenberg

Schools are launching pads, launching our kids into their futures. Unfortunately, a lot of what we teach now looks identical to what we taught 40, 50, or 60 years ago. There's a need for both timeless curriculum content and timely content. What seems to be falling by the wayside is timely content.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

A Quote by Will Self

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