Sketching and natural languages are effective communication media for interactive applications. We introduce Sketchforme, the first neural-network-based system that can generate sketches based on text descriptions specified by users. Sketchforme is capable of gaining high-level and low-level understanding of multi-object sketched scenes without being trained on sketched scene datasets annotated with text descriptions. The sketches composed by Sketchforme are expressive and realistic: we show in our user study that these sketches convey descriptions better than human-generated sketches in multiple cases, and 36.5% of those sketches are considered to be human-generated. We develop multiple interactive applications using these generated sketches, and show that Sketchforme can significantly improve language learning applications and support intelligent language-based sketching assistants.