This is what I mean when I call myself a writer . . . I construct sentences.

Don DeLillo

. . . the cell beyond which the life of the book cannot be traced, a novel being a structure of such cells. In another sense, only the sentence exists or at any rate can be proved to exist. Even at the stage of the paragraph things are becoming theoretical and arbitrary. A ‘novel’ is an utter hallucination; no definition of it, for example, can really distinguish it from a laundry list. But a sentence – there you have something essential, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken.

Thomas Berger