Top 66 Paragraph Quotes

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.

I can be just as effective with a quick retort or a one-liner than with a big paragraph.

You don’t write a book. You write a sentence and then a paragraph and then a page and then a chapter. Looking at writing 400 plus pages or seventy thousand odd words is incredibly daunting, but if you just focus on the immediate picture – say, 500 words – it’s not so overwhelming.

I rarely tweet unless I’m talking about ‘The Bachelor.’ I have a love/hate relationship with Instagram, though – it’s like a rigid parent. It’s much more restrictive with what can be posted, but you can write a full paragraph, post a video – it changes the game a little bit.

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.

I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn’t stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.

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.

I imagine an America that can actually change. That we become a nation that prospers again but without pillaging the resources of nations that make their people hate us. That we become a nation that, as the constitution says in its preamble, its very first paragraph, ‘promotes the general welfare’ of its people.

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.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

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.

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.

You don’t write a book. You write a sentence and then a paragraph and then a page and then a chapter. Looking at writing 400 plus pages or seventy thousand odd words is incredibly daunting, but if you just focus on the immediate picture – say, 500 words – it’s not so overwhelming.

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.

I’ll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I’m ready to begin.

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.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I’m dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I’m rereading Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation.’ I love it, and she’s just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it’s mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

I don’t do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

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.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work – by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by line, paragraph by paragraph to see what you liked about it.

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

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.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don’t get past the third paragraph you’ve wasted your energy and valuable ink.

I’m rereading Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation.’ I love it, and she’s just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it’s mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I’m more your paragraph kind of gal.

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?

And I think a good writer’s gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

Here, in this very first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can ‘the consent of the governed’ be given if the right to vote be denied?

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

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.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called ‘The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,’ and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

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?

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

I remember reading one of those big history texts in elementary school, and in that whole book there was one paragraph that mentioned that Japanese-Americans were interned. I went home and asked my father, ‘You weren’t, were you?’ He said, ‘Yes, I was.’ I was shocked.

I’ve kind of changed my diet, but in my diet rulebook, on section 5 paragraph A, there’s a cheating plan. So, Corky’s BBQ is one of my favorite spots to go to.

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.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don’t get past the third paragraph you’ve wasted your energy and valuable ink.

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.

At university – when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry – I had tried to write a children’s book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf’s point of view.

I’ll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I’m ready to begin.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work – by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

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.

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.