Top 100 Paragraph Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Also, whenever I read this paragraph to people who don't live in the South, they get hung up on the fact that we had furniture devoted to just guns, but in rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they're gay. Then they have gun armoires.
Jenny Lawson
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
George Orwell
#7. If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.
Tim O'Brien
#9. I think it's important to be accurate on the level of the word, but it's also important to be accurate at the level of the sentence, at the level of the paragraph. Sometimes you lose sight of that - I remind myself to go back and read.
Ann Goldstein
#10. If you are reading a large newspaper, all spread out on the table, your cat will come and sit on the very paragraph you are reading, the talented cat draping her tail with miraculous precision over the very line you're not finished with.
Leonore Fleischer
#11. Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book ... just start with a word!
Mark Pettinger
#12. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don't wish for it to end, or for it to never end.
Matt Haig
#13. 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
#14. We both know that if any one of our lives was simplified into a paragraph, we'd all come out sounding pretty bad. No one is easy or simple, or good or bad, we all feel too much for that.
Rita Stradling
#15. I suppose half a klick won on some alien rock has a price about the same as a paragraph gained in the storehouse of human knowledge.
Hugh Howey
#16. 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
#17. the following paragraph from an article of his on British rule in India, written in 1853:
Anonymous
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. It is far more rewarding to complete one paragraph of quality work, than one whole chapter of drivel.
Shirley Dawson
#21. In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.
Meghan Daum
#22. 37. On this point, and the whole paragraph, see especially Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
J. Ross Wagner
#23. 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
#24. Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
Nancy Kress
#25. This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
#26. Certainly on a political and a legislative level, Bill Clinton was effective, but the example that he ultimately left, I think for posterity, tragically, is going to begin with that single paragraph lead with the White House intern.
Joe Eszterhas
#27. The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.
Douglas Brinkley
#28. For life's not a paragraph/ and death, i think, is no parenthesis.
E. E. Cummings
#29. Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya's world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA.'1 This was the opening paragraph in The Economist's article of 27 May 2013, 'Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?
Victor Kgomoeswana
#30. 2. As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning.
William Strunk Jr.
#31. I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.
Julia Bell
#32. I'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#33. 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
#34. If you can't write at least a paragraph on your goal then it is clearly not compelling enough. You need to either find the right reason or find the right goal.
Tony Johnson
#35. 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
#36. You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.
Alain De Botton
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.
Clifford Geertz
#41. Then we're on the same page. Same paragraph, same sentence," I snapped. "Same bloody word," he agreed flatly.
Karen Marie Moning
#42. 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
#43. Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
#44. Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.
Dr. Seuss
#45. In truth we re-create our reputation every day. Journalists with thirty years of credibility have washed their careers down the drain with one plagiarized paragraph.
Anonymous
#46. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
Rabih Alameddine
#47. And by the way, you really do suck in the romance department. Hallmark will never put that last paragraph on a card.
Alessandra Torre
#48. Write a word
Put several words together to make a sentence
Put several sentences together to make a paragraph
Put enough paragraphs together and you have a story.
D.B. Macks
#49. 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
#50. The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
Irwin Shaw
#51. Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching
and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.
Laurie Notaro
#53. Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.
Ernest Gaines
#54. 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
#55. Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.
Raymond Chandler
#56. Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#57. 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
#58. Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section.
Dan Jenkins
#59. 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
#60. Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#61. 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
#62. I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
Jayne Anne Phillips
#63. My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.
Geraldine Brooks
#64. 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
#65. All these things Alanna knew from her father's books and maps, but the reality took her breath away as a paragraph written in a book never could.
Tamora Pierce
#67. 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
#68. He writes a paragraph a day. A paragraph for Maya. It isn't much, but it's what he has left to give. He
Gabrielle Zevin
#69. For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.
Michael Chabon
#70. Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.
Peter Straub
#72. Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!
Diane Ackerman
#73. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.
(This is a reference to an E.E. Cummings poem within the author's work)
Paula Hawkins
#74. 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
#75. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language ...
Salman Rushdie
#76. Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, "Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?"
Fran Lebowitz
#77. 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
#78. In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.
Darin Strauss
#79. 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
#80. Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
Larry McMurtry
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.
W.P. Kinsella
#84. 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
#85. I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.
Ron Rash
#86. 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
#88. You string some letters together, and you make a word. You string some words together, and you make a sentence, then a paragraph, then a chapter. Words have power.
Chloe Neill
#89. 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
#90. Is there a Bible chapter, I wonder? Futilities, verse four, paragraph two?'
'There will be.'
'And will I write it?'
'I have faith in you, Father!'
'Reverend!' he cried.
'Reverend,' I said.
Ray Bradbury
#91. My movies were not reaping the kind of emotional rewards that I wanted. I wanted them to be appreciated and they weren't. I didn't want the reviews to say, "Mel Brooks has made another movie," and you get the title somewhere in the second paragraph.
Mel Brooks
#92. Remind me to show you the latest e-mail from Courtney," he said now, kicking at a rock on the sidewalk. "You won't believe how many different incorrect ways she spelled hors d'oeuvres within the span of a single paragraph.
Aimee Agresti
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.
Trent Reznor
#97. 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
#99. 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
#100. It gave me no chance. He (Nolan Ryan) just blew it (strikeout #5,000) by me. But its an honor. I'll have another paragraph in all the baseball books. I'm already in the books three or four times.
Rickey Henderson
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