Paragraph quotes:

Send

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph. -- Dorothy Thompson
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. -- V. S. Naipaul
You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink. -- Carl Hiaasen
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. -- George Saunders
The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work. -- Sid Fleischman
It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work. -- Edward Gibbon
The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side. -- Colm Toibin
Books don't change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences. -- John Piper
The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic. -- Dirk Bogarde
Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings. -- Nancy Kress
The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out. -- Irwin Shaw
I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke. -- Rush Limbaugh
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs. -- James Thurber
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms -- Aristotle
When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I'm more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often. -- Meg Ryan
Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips - integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.She connects. She stirs and provokes. -- Timothy Findley
Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way. -- John P. Kotter
The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories. -- Ezra Pound
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. -- William Strunk, Jr.
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. -- Franklin P. Adams
Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am! -- Henry David Thoreau
I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that? -- Ray Bradbury
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. -- Mark Twain
Write every day even if it is just a paragraph. -- Michael Connelly
Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday. -- Ernest Gaines
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well. -- Aidan Chambers
The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out. -- Irwin Shaw
I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph. -- Sloane Crosley
Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute. -- Franklin Pierce Adams
Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by line, paragraph by paragraph to see what you liked about it. -- W. P. Kinsella
I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing. -- Barry Schwartz
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. -- William Strunk, Jr.
A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph. -- Bjorn Lomborg
What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene. -- Chaim Potok
There are days when I'll write for 15 minutes and have to give up and move around, and I'll write another paragraph and give up again. On other days I get intensely - focused on the process, sit down at 8 A.M. and won't get up until 8 P.M. -- Rick Riordan
When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it. -- Irvine Welsh
When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument. -- Chad Harbach
I imagine an America that can actually change. That we become a nation that prospers again but without pillaging the resources of nations that make their people hate us. That we become a nation that, as the constitution says in its preamble, its very first paragraph, 'promotes the general welfare' of its people. -- Richard Schiff
I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school. -- Vince Flynn
I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work. -- Adam Ross
In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. -- Cynthia Ozick
And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different. -- Harlan Coben
If you want to lose 40 pounds, you order salad instead of fries. If you want to be a better friend, you take the phone call instead of screening it. If you want to write a novel, you sit down and write a single paragraph. It's scary to make major changes, but we usually have enough courage to take the next right step. -- Regina Brett
And that's one thing that helps me is I learn it blandly, vanilla, then I don't try to act it too soon because you start to act it, and you kind of go away from what the next sentence is, what the next paragraph is. So get it down so it kind of can - it's in there so you can then, as I call it, dance on top of it. -- Jeff Daniels
A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is. -- Gertrude Stein
When in doubt, always start a new paragraph. -- Grace S. Richmond
It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition. -- Haruki Murakami
Your personality should be described in poem not in paragraph. -- Amit Kalantri
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. -- Harold Bloom
life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis -- e. e. cummings
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it -- Clifford Geertz
Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters. -- Larry McMurtry
I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like. -- Steven Amsterdam
Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph. -- Ernest Hemingway
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say. -- Sebastian Faulks
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. -- Philip Roth
My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal. -- Geraldine Brooks
I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible. -- Rabih Alameddine
Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count. -- Dr. Seuss
I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards. -- Truman Capote
Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section. -- Dan Jenkins
I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column. -- Don Marquis
The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors. -- John Rhys-Davies
A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit. -- Renata Adler
If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once. -- Tana French
Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected. -- M.F. Moonzajer
There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan. -- Malcolm Turnbull
[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph. -- John Darnielle
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph. -- Patrick Modiano
Personally, it's changed my game - it's how I think now. Can't imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn't do MMD. -- Merlin Mann
--
My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along. -- Anne Lamott
There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found. -- Gertrude Stein
When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track. -- Peter De Vries
Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events? -- Elizabeth Bibesco
To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely. -- Gail Carson Levine
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used. -- Susan Sontag
I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even. -- Edan Lepucki
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity. -- Paul Auster
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. -- William Zinsser
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. -- Mark Twain
The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I do small cameos here and there but nothing that requires more than a paragraph of talking, because I'm just an amateur. The movie is a whole different reality. -- Richard Price
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation. -- Siri Hustvedt
I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. -- Lynn Abbey
To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops. -- Margaret Fuller
And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it. -- Kurt Loder
With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead. -- Jonathan Lethem
One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesnt hurt, either. -- Carmen Agra Deedy
I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn't hurt, either. -- Carmen Agra Deedy
No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
Sometimes when I'm really enjoying a book, I'll read a sentence or paragraph and just think - how can someone's head be wired in such a way that they'd come up with that? -- Joe Abercrombie
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. -- David Mitchell
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. -- Jorge Luis Borges
I woke up at five o'clock in the morning with the whole first paragraph in my head. Now, this just shows what a slothful person I am: I tried to go back to sleep. -- Fran Lebowitz
Kid, not everything in life can be summed up neatly in a paragraph. No book has all of the answers. Not even the really good ones. You have to find the answers yourself sometimes. -- Heather Brewer
I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. -- James Thurber
There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it. -- Charles Guggenheim
I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin -- Anne Tyler
I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin. -- Anne Tyler
If you had half an hour of exercise this morning, you're in the right frame of mind to sit still and focus on this paragraph, and your brain is far more equipped to remember it. -- John Ratey
Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book. -- Erich Fromm

Send