Top 241 Paragraph Quotes & Sayings - Page 2
Explore popular Paragraph quotes.
Last updated on December 18, 2024.
The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
If you had half an hour of exercise this morning, you're in the right frame of mind to sit still and focus on this paragraph, and your brain is far more equipped to remember it.
I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn't hurt, either.
A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
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'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
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.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.
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?
Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.
I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.
For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
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.
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.
Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes when I'm really enjoying a book, I'll read a sentence or paragraph and just think - how can someone's head be wired in such a way that they'd come up with that?
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.
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.
With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.
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.
The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.
Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.
I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesnt hurt, either.
A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
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?
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.
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 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.
To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
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.
My movies were not reaping the kind of emotional rewards that I wanted. I wanted them to be appreciated and they weren't. I didn't want the reviews to say, "Mel Brooks has made another movie," and you get the title somewhere in the second paragraph.
Technically I've improved - I might turn a metaphor in five words now, where years ago, it would have taken me a paragraph. I can't say it was intentional - but you know what they say about practice making perfect...!
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 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.
I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
Certainly on a political and a legislative level, Bill Clinton was effective, but the example that he ultimately left, I think for posterity, tragically, is going to begin with that single paragraph lead with the White House intern.
Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'
I am constantly distracted by my own brain when I've completed a paragraph, realized I don't know what comes next, and start opening a browser tab without even realizing it.
In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.
Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.
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.
There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.
With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
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?
[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last 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.
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.
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.
