First Paragraphs Quotes

#1. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.

Caitlin Horrocks

#2. My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.

Peter Carey

#3. I've always wanted to be a manga-ka, so I'm doing what I love.

Tite Kubo

#4. I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#5. Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

Ally Carter

#6. That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

Abraham Lincoln

#7. I begin by writing paragraphs that don't have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

Grace Paley

#8. Stop living in the past, and stop letting your past dictate your future. Learn from your mistakes and move on.

Joy Lincoln

#9. In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

Ruth Rendell

#10. My accountant regularly asks to take me to lunch. I always say I can't afford it.

Anne Robinson

#11. There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Nancy Kress

#12. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Ernest Hemingway,

#13. In certain books - some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

Robert Henri

#14. After the near-total destruction of Dresden in the Allied fire-bombing of February 1945, few people believed that its beauty would ever return. Dresden's slow but steady comeback was thus met with great relief.

Gunter Blobel

#15. My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.

Ron Rash

#16. In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

Raymond Aron

#17. No new reader, however charitable, could open "Fifty Shades of Grey," browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

Anthony Lane