A Quote by Alexander Woollcott

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.
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.
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
Each story, good and bad, short or long-from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness-they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.
When you are in the line of your duty, it is like standing in front of a line of posts, and every post is in line. But step one step aside, and every post looks as though it were not quite in line. The farther you get away from that straight line, the more crooked the posts will appear. It is the straight and narrow path of duty that will lead you and me back to the presence of God.
In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
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.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.
I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.
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 youre doing is not any kind of public show, until youre ready for it.
Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would yield every honor which has been accorded by war.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.
Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph. Until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety - it's the job.
To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
Trying to take a feeling from one language, and express it in another is naturally that's my goal. You can't possibly achieve that in a perfect way because there's so many things you have to take into consideration. You know, think about every word, every sentence, every paragraph, and do what you can.
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