First Paragraphs Quotes & Sayings

As you can see, at my age - 48 - Art is still one big experiment. — E. J. Hughes

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

The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side. — Colm Toibin

All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis. — Jacques Ellul

BERNSTEIN: "I'll read you the first few paragraphs." (He got as far as the third. Mitchell responded, "JEEEEEEEEESUS" every few words.) MITCHELL: "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard." BERNSTEIN: "Sir, I'd like to ask you a few questions about - " MITCHELL: "What time is it?" BERNSTEIN: "Eleven thirty. I'm sorry to call so late." MITCHELL: "Eleven thirty. Eleven thirty when?" BERNSTEIN: "Eleven thirty at night." MITCHELL: "Oh." BERNSTEIN: "The committee has issued a statement about the story, but I'd like to ask you a few questions about the specifics of what the story contains." MITCHELL: "Did the committee tell you to go ahead and publish that story? You fellows got a great ballgame going. As soon as you're through paying Ed Williams* and the rest of those fellows, we're going to do a story on all of you. — Carl Bernstein

I saw a drummer play once when I was a kid and I thought, that's really cool. You know, you're moving. You're using your arms and fingers. So I tried it and I loved it. — Bill Kreutzmann

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject. — Raymond Aron

Ah, the magic of music, with it, all things are possible. — E.A. Bucchianeri

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. — Winston S. Churchill

No new reader, however charitable, could open "Fifty Shades of Grey," browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. — Anthony Lane

One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small. — Marion Nestle

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it. — Ron Rash

Being successful is kind of dull. — Nolan Bushnell

a girl has got to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can't never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man - good enough even for the respect of other women. — Toni Morrison

I have been branded with folly and madness for attempting what the world calls impossibilities, and even from the great engineer, the late James Watt, who said ... that I deserved hanging for bringing into use the high-pressure engine. This has so far been my reward from the public; but should this be all, I shall be satisfied by the great secret pleasure and laudable pride that I feel in my own breast from having been the instrument of bringing forward new principles and new arrangements of boundless value to my country, and however much I may be straitened in pecuniary circumstances, the great honour of being a useful subject can never be taken from me, which far exceeds riches. — Richard Trevithick

For me, growing up in hip-hop culture, it's all about having the next style, the new fashion, the new way to express yourself, the fly new beat. I can't sit still; I have no nostalgia. I don't have to have nostalgia. — El-P

Kids will keep it real. If I've ever had in my life a great anchor, it's them. They get in your head, 'don't get too famous.' If you think you're really famous and think you're really hip, go hang out with your kids for an afternoon. That's about as earthbound as it's going to get. — Lionel Richie

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. — Lionel Fisher

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. — Ally Carter

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows. I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Words want to be sampled, relished, remembered; they need breathing space in the shape of commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. Words are individual. They are content to string along together in sentences and paragraphs, but remain mavericks, outsiders beyond the crowd, the mob, the gang. A long novel begins with the first word. — Chloe Thurlow

I have to find my happy thoughts, and my pain, and let them do their alchemic dance to become words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and eventually a novel. It always seems a little improbable that I can sit at a blank computer screen and just keep typing until I have a whole book. It's like getting into your car with a full tank of gas, but no idea where you're going, or how long the journey will be, but there's an envelope in the glove compartment. It will contain the first clue, and the direction to start driving.

What direction do we start? South - lets burn this mother fucker down! — Laurell K. Hamilton

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key. — David Levithan

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die. — Peter Carey

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. — Ernest Hemingway,

The other chief love- and how similar it was to science, and how different- was reading. As soon as she realized the figures on the page meant something- could be strung together as words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs- she was covetous of the whole system. It seemed a new universe to her. And it was. Everything opened up. Some stories were meant to inform, and others were meant to entertain. And then other stories were separate from those- this the young teacher did not tell her, it was something Angelene figured out on her own, the first year, when a man visited and read them a poem out of a tome of poems- that seemed crafted to relay some secret, and even more than that, some secret about herself. Angelene was mesmerized. What was available for her to know? What secrets did the world hold? Which secrets would be revealed to her through the soil, and which through words? — Amanda Coplin

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions. — Ruth Rendell

There are no indisputable truths. — Ozzy Osbourne

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

Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong. — Caitlin Horrocks

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers. — Nancy Kress

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:
Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker. — Michael Chabon

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don't just tie on a pair of running shoes and go out and run a marathon. You have to be in running shape, just like you have to be in writing shape. — Julie Tetel Andresen

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.
--Fire Up Your Writing Brain — Susan Reynolds