It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.
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.
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.
I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. " She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.
I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.
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.
Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips - integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing. She connects. She stirs and provokes.
Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms
Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about.
We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
I think you learn how to write by reading an enormous amount, so then your memory is stocked with various constructions, various ways of shaping a paragraph, shaping a chapter.
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.
