“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

— David Foster Wallace

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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David Foster Wallace 185

American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 2, Simplicity, p. 12.

“I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

“Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.

“Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

These words, which have been widely attributed to Scalia, do not appear in any of his writings or statements. http://www.snopes.com/scalia-death-penalty-quote He nonetheless remarked in Herrera v. Collins (1993, concurring) that state courts had no obligation to review a death sentence on factual innocence grounds, an opinion that he repeated in In re Davis (2009, dissenting).
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