Quote

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

Susan Orlean

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Orlean
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 31
Journalist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Exactly
Sound
Comes
Tweak
Sense
Mastery
Writing
Marvelous
Sentence
Sentences
Sounds

More quotes by Susan Orlean

Image
Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
Susan Orlean
Image
I didn't want to talk, and I didn't think dogs could solve my problems. But they were so uncritical and un-judgmental. Sometimes when you're really blue, you don't want to talk, but you want that sense of companionship. I certainly enjoy that with my beasts.
Susan Orlean
Image
College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.
Susan Orlean
Image
In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
Susan Orlean
Image
I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don't find it crippling to work on one rather than the other.
Susan Orlean
Image
A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
Susan Orlean
Image
When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower.
Susan Orlean
Image
The fact that dogs are not people means you don't have as much response to the particulars.
Susan Orlean
Image
I've always been afraid of video games - not afraid that I wouldn't like them, but that I would like them too much, and that after mere seconds in front of any particularly bright and absorbing game, I would abandon all ambition, turn into a mouth-breathing zombie, and develop a wide, sofa-shaped rear end.
Susan Orlean
Image
Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn't have to come in contact with it.
Susan Orlean
Image
Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.
Susan Orlean
Image
When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
Susan Orlean
Image
I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.
Susan Orlean
Image
Sometimes I'm dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us that's the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.
Susan Orlean
Image
I think the responsibility of running a huge business, which happens if you become a successful designer, probably makes you more careful.
Susan Orlean
Image
I've noticed lately that it seems most intimate to not use any closing on your e-mail at all, because it seems to make it feel like you are engaged in an ongoing conversation - as if this one e-mail doesn't represent the beginning and end of the interaction but is just part of a perpetual loop of friendly back-and-forth.
Susan Orlean
Image
Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
Susan Orlean
Image
Being a good designer certainly doesn't guarantee that you're good at business. It's probably more surprising when the two talents coexist in one person.
Susan Orlean
Image
Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
Susan Orlean
Image
Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.
Susan Orlean