newcomer with some questions about the basics

If you call digitalWrite() or analogWrite() then the pin will stay in that state until you set it to otherwise.

There might not be any need for a delay, you could just poll your sensors however many times per seond your code runs.

You might run into the circumstance where you want to react faster than 1 loop of your code would take, there are a few ways you could cope with such a situation but I'd wait till it's a problem. (One easy way that might suit might be to not poll every input every iteration).