Top 241 Paragraph Quotes & Sayings

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

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.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

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.

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books.

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

Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

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

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.

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

Every weekday morning, I picture my first paragraph while I hike with my dog Milo near Mulholland Drive, looking out over the San Fernando Valley. I edit the paragraph, then memorize it, so that when I get back home and sit down at my computer, the blank screen's tyranny lasts only a second or two. A brief reign!

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

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

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.

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

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

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.

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.

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.

Whenever I teach writing I tell them to never revise as you go. Finish the first draft. This is my writing advice. I can't do that myself. I'm lying to everybody. I write a paragraph, and then I rewrite that paragraph. I want to feel like I'm standing on firm ground before I move on to the next paragraph. Mentally, I have to do that.

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

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.

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.

It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

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

When in doubt, always start a new paragraph.

Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

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

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

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

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

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

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.

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.

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.

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

I write slowly. I can't move on until I've got a paragraph right.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

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.

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

The famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to the inaugural address of Nelson Mandela. About the misattribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people.

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.