On Writing

“I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say ‘paragraph,’ but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me.”

— Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me.” The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading, ed. Michael Dorris