Quotes About Style

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

The treasure of a writer is to maintain their own style.

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

Bob Marley is a huge influence. I love reggae music, but I also love the purpose of the songs he writes and the style of the music - it takes your worries away and makes you feel good, and I think that's what music is about.

James Taylor is the kind of person I always thought the word 'folksinger' referred to. He writes and sings songs that are reflections of his own life, and performs in them in his own style. All of his performances are marked by an eloquent simplicity.

Think about appearances. I wanted my apartment to be less cluttered, and also to look less cluttered.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.

Be it then known that I was born on the family Estate in Devonshire, of the 10th day of August, 1690 (or in the new Gregorian Stile of Reckoning, the 20th of August)

It was a typical point, made in typical style, mixing pride and humility.

Clothes and accessories were a person's creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting.

Every author has some peculiarity in his descriptions or in his style of writing. Those who do not like him, magnify it, shrug up their shoulders, and exclaim __ there he is again!

Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy.

The Smith and Wesson was stainless steel, as opposed to black. Easy to see in the dark. I could also hear him pull back the hammer. You do that on a revolver, not a semiautomatic." "And the Beretta?" "I can't be sure of the exact make, but it had a floating barrel in the style of Beretta." "As