Top 42 Quotes About Paragraph Writing
#2. 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
#3. Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
Nancy Kress
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.
Alain De Botton
#7. 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
#8. Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.
Dr. Seuss
#9. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
Rabih Alameddine
#10. The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.
Stephen King
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.
Ishmael Reed
#18. Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
Larry McMurtry
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.
David A. Adler
#23. 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
#24. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
Philip Roth
#25. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.
Steven Hall
#26. I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.
Steven Amsterdam
#27. 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
#28. I count it a high honor to belong to a profession in which the good men write every paragraph, every sentence, every line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf.
Alexander Woollcott
#29. 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
#30. Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Barrett Wendell
#31. What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,
Phillip Lopate
#32. I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.
Margery Allingham
#33. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.
Robert Rankin
#34. 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
#35. If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.
James Patterson
#36. It's easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What's difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book you can write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#37. 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
#38. When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
Billy Collins
#39. Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
Janet Fitch
#41. 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
#42. 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
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