Words matter. These are the best Paragraphs Quotes from famous people such as A. E. van Vogt, Jesse Andrews, Ruth Rendell, James Rollins, Rodney Crowell, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.
I’m influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.
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.
I’m pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it’s only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.
Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.
You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I’m not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.
A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel ‘The World According to Garp,’ John Irving’s denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character’s fate and each almost a story in itself.
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?
When you’re writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
After I finish writing a chapter, I’ll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren’t that terrific.
I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.
The spark for ‘In Praise of Slowness’ came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
It’s always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.
You play a hologram on ‘Star Trek,’ and you have to spew line after line. I spoke in paragraphs on ‘Star Trek.’
I even dream about writing. I’m talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.
When you’re writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can’t swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you’re writing for the next day.
A Hallmark card with paragraphs about my beauty written by a stranger is vaguely depressing.
I’m very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I’m much less driven than they are. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don’t suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I’m more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often.
I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
There is a dumbing down of the news. Newspapers today seem more like tabloids. I have to wade through seven newspapers before I can find a couple of paragraphs that are serious news. What a pity!
