The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.

H. W. Brands

It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

A. E. van Vogt

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Adam Ross

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

Aidan Chambers

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

Alan Colmes

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.

Ali Smith

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.

Ali Smith

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

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

Amy Bloom

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.

Anne Tyler

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

Anthony Marra

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.

Ashwin Sanghi

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.

Barry Schwartz

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

Bill Callahan

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.

Bill Clegg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

Brendan Gill

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.

C. S. Forester

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.

Carl Hiaasen

The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

Carl Honore

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.

Carmen Agra Deedy