“What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”

“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.”

“… a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

“Sentence first; verdict afterwards." -Queen of Hearts”

“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

“In my sentences I go where no man has gone before.”

“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.”

“After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that lead to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.”

“Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.”