Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing… For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing. John Banville
About This Quote

My problem with writing is that I am so focused on getting the sentence to sing that I often lose sight of the meaning. I get caught up in the craft and can’t see the whole picture. Writing is like a musician, who must focus completely on the melody and forget about whether it is in tune or not.

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  1. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
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