First Paragraph Quotes

#1. When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

Colleen Hoover

#2. Grab 'em in the first paragraph, hold 'em until the last period and leave them wanting more!

Bobbi Cole Meyer

#3. 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

#4. How many words are you having trouble with, sir?"
"Just the ones that I've highlighted."
"I count at least a dozen, and I haven't gotten out of the first paragraph."
"That's as far as I got, too. I'm not sure you and I speak the same language.

Howard Tayler

#5. And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

Philip Pullman

#6. 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

#7. The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

Italo Calvino

#8. I wonder about my sister Janelle, too, who does know and wrote me this email - this long, long email that I had to close and not look at, because the first paragraph contained the words 'I forgive you', and I don't want anyone's forgiveness.

I'm not the one who has to be forgiven.

Robin York

#9. Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.

Paul O'Neill

#10. The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.

Ashwin Sanghi

#11. 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

#12. What may intimidate a man is a woman who thinks with her mind before she feels with her heart. Nevertheless what determines the strength in the man is his ability to accept one when he sees one.

Criss Jami

#13. The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes - many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph - were punishable by death.

Susanne Alleyn

#14. At 23 it was all about acting. Today it's getting my kids to school, making sure that they've done their homework. I'm in my fifties, and I'm turning into a square.

Gary Oldman

#15. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy.

Jorge Luis Borges

#16. Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.

Paul Goodman

#17. 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

#18. If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Katherine Anne Porter

#19. It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.

H.P. Lovecraft

#20. If Lana Walters had given any thought to dying, she'd have assumed it would hurt more. Instead, when the bus hit her, the lights simply went out. One moment of inattention and then, nothing. Next she knew, she was weightless, flying above Boston.

Mae Archer

#21. Sunday is my favorite day.

Emma Caulfield

#22. In any medium, I also start out assuming - even planning - that I'll delete the first thing I do, whether it's a paragraph or the first few rows of a scarf. That makes those first steps far less precious and therefore less intimidating.

Kim Piper Werker

#23. Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Cornelia Funke

#24. Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.

Robert Benchley

#25. Sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired,

Jack London

#26. It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

Haruki Murakami

#27. I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.

Irvin D. Yalom

#28. Make your plans as fantastic as you like, because 25 years from now they will seem mediocre. You will wonder why you did not make them 50 times as great

Henry Curtis

#29. Among all the sutras I have expounded,
Lotus Sutra is the first and foremost!
If you are able to uphold the Lotus Sutra,
it means you are able to uphold the body of a Buddha!
(LS 11: 3.35)
Lotus Sutra, Chapter 11, Section 3, Paragraph 35

Gautama Buddha

#30. 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

#31. I'll get a three-page letter and the last paragraph says 'I know you'll never read this, but here's my number.' I love to call those people because the first thing they say is, 'Governor, I didn't mean everything I said in the letter about you.'

Dave Heineman