Quotes About Writing

It's a matter of style. The Evan Hunter style and the Ed McBain style are very, very different.

I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

It's good for a story to have a strong style.

Myself, I'm just a simple country boy who spent time on the streets and developed a style of writing and rapping and a cool sound that people seem to enjoy.

I can't write in a whole lot of different styles, trying to please the highbrows one time and the lowbrows the next. I pretty much have a basic style I employ.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

When you write a story, it just flows and you don't control it. It's subconscious.

My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked.

A lot of writing takes place in the subconscious, and it's bound to have an effect.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

It's interesting what pops out of an author's subconscious when he's not thinking about it.

I've found that when I'm having trouble solidifying a character or a scene, that music will often free my subconscious just that last little bit to allow me to move forward, and often it's in a direction that I didn't expect, but is 100 percent true to the character.

The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.

I've never detected a correlation between where I am and what I write. I think there could be something subconscious, though. And I can't really speak for my subconscious.

I absolutely love writing about the things that scare me, the things that keep me up at night. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because so many things do scare me, and this is my subconscious way of trying to exercise some control over things that go bump in the night!