Top 17 First Paragraphs Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.
Raymond Aron
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. In certain books - some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.
Robert Henri
#10. 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
#11. My accountant regularly asks to take me to lunch. I always say I can't afford it.
Anne Robinson
#12. Stop living in the past, and stop letting your past dictate your future. Learn from your mistakes and move on.
Joy Lincoln
#13. I begin by writing paragraphs that don't have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
Grace Paley
#14. That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.
Abraham Lincoln
#15. I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#16. I've always wanted to be a manga-ka, so I'm doing what I love.
Tite Kubo
#17. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top