Paragraph Quotes

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can't have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

By the time you finish touring the record, everything that's exciting to me is what's ahead of me. I want to write the next paragraph.

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

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.

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.

Hot women have to stop putting long paragraphs of text on their bodies. I know you think it's sexy but one thing that men never think is, "Gee, you know what would make this sex better? Having something to read."

Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.

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.

Sometimes words are not enough. There are some circumstances so utterly wretched that I cannot describe them in sentences or paragraphs or even a whole series of books.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

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 like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

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.

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.

A good solo is like a book. It will start out in a phrase, it will go on in paragraphs, and then it will have a great ending.

I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

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.

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

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

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

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.

There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. You bastards, she thought. You lovely bastards. Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.

If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are.

I found out - the paper used to go to bed on Tues - on Monday. I found out that on Monday nights, the editors would cut out - literally cut out passages, sometimes whole paragraphs, of some of the writers that might possibly offend blacks, lesbians, gays, radicals. And I wrote a couple of columns about that. And they're - of course, they were annoyed that I had written about it, but, I mean, it - another example - and [my wife Margot] always also conjured that.

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?

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.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

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.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.