Pay Attention, Would-be Writers

"I believe in the primacy of the sentence as the unit of composition. The sentence is the one thing that prose fiction can give you that a movie, say, or a painting simply cannot. I seem to see quite a bit of flimsiness and ungivingness in the contemporary literary sentence, a lot of underconsideration and artlessness. I see a lot of fiction with the brightly impermanent surfaces of feature journalism. The sort of sentence I tend to fall for has both an instancy and an ultimacy about it—a lone, grave yelp preserved in a kind of epigrammatic casing."

- Gary Lutz