Writing Style Quotes

As for developing a writing style'I would say that I tried to copy the pacing of the old movies I loved as a kid. ~ Kola Boof

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire. ~ Jewel

Style means the right word. The rest matters little. ~ Jules Renard

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Andrea Novick ~ Philippe Le Douarec

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading. ~ Douglas Crockford

I enjoy writing in a lot of different styles, so I pushed to find that vicious place, or that vulnerable place, and let it exist as intensely as I could. ~ Mikky Ekko

Tides of History provides a splendid prism through which we may view the wider world of Victorian science ... Historians of science will have cause to heap praise on this book, but so too will the non-specialists. The author's splendid writing style, at times appropriately Puckish, makes this work an accessible and enjoyable read. ~ William M. Fowler

Style is important, but content comes first. ~ James J. Kilpatrick

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.
And the gods said, "Let there be a Page, and many a Page," and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good. ~ Chila Woychik

We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the 'writing style' of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed. ~ David Crane

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness. ~ Cyril Connolly

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince's writing style(s) during the course of the album's recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of 'Electric Chair' among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that "he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn't really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious - it's like something you'd do if you had no access to any equipment. He'd use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he'd record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song - and most likely, he'd have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he'd do his one man band approach to recording a song. He'd know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the 'click track' - the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo - he'd then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He'd build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there's your demo. ~ Jake Brown

You develop a style from writing a lot. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting. ~ Edmund White

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it. ~ David Hare

I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors. ~ Frederick Lenz

One does not consider style, because style is. ~ Robert Stone

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality? ~ Remy De Gourmont

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults. ~ Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl Of Roscommon

We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull. ~ Richard C. Wydick

Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families. ~ Tom Johnson

Try as we might, we write what we write ~ B.G. Thurston

English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor. ~ Storm Princeholm

Efore the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation series of books began to appear in 1979, the scientific autobiography was a largely unfamiliar genre. One recalls Cajal's extraordinary Recollections of My Life, translated into English in 1937, and the little gem of autobiography written by Charles Darwin for his grandchildren in 1876. One supposes that this form of scientific writing is scarce because busy scientists would rather continue to work on scientific problems than to indulge in a retrospective exercise using a writing style ~ Anonymous

By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. ~ George Orwell

You are in love with my husband. You need some acting lessons to learn to hide it better. ~ Mary Papas

Nightclub City tells the behind-the-scenes story of Manhattan's glamorous nightlife at its peak. Packed with colorful characters, terrific original research, and an unusually accessible writing style, Nightclub City is a gritty social history of America's most glitzy fantasies. ~ Debby Applegate

When we come across a natural style, we are surprised and delighted; for we expected an author, and we
find a man. ~ Blaise Pascal

So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous. ~ Deborah Smith

He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.

{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss} ~ Niels Henrik Abel

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic. ~ Nicholas Royle

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development ~ Stephen D. Krashen

Each time you sit down to write, you should cleanse your linguistic palate by reading some things that are vastly unlike what you've been writing. As a warm-up activity, you might try actively imitating a writing style different from your own. It's hard to do and highly unpriming. ~ Michael Erard

I don't write as much erotic romance as I used to, but I think that's just because my writing style has changed. ~ Shiloh Walker

It's somewhat of a contradiction, .. I guess the quieter the voice, the more necessary it is to push it. It's not going to leap out at you and scream. I also can't control how a book is marketed. To say the book marketing is aggressive, fine, I'm happy with that. Push the book. That doesn't mean that my personality or writing style changes. ~ David Bergen

STYLE IS NOT HOW YOU WRITE IT IS HOW YOUDO NOT WRITE LIKE ANYONE ELSE ~ Charles Ghigna

I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me. ~ Henry Rollins

Most of us find our own voices only after we've sounded like a lot of other people. ~ Neil Gaiman

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style. ~ Tom Wolfe

Style is to forget all styles. ~ Jules Renard

A writer's voice emanates from their interest and compulsions that absorbs them completely. Only by fully committing himself or herself to a pet subject or issue can the writer develop a thematic tone that speaks to other people with authority and serenity. The quality of their literary voice is the crucial part of the writer's legitimacy, and their authenticity cannot come from mimicking other writers' style, but must evolve naturally from their inner sanctity and must flow effusively from an inner necessity. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive. ~ Claire Danes

The writer's silent mind is a period of intermission before orchestrating a symphony of words. ~ Khaled Talib

This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit. ~ Tom Standage

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did. ~ Fay Weldon

I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that. ~ Dan Alatorre

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own. ~ Naveed Saleh

A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn. ~ Samuel Johnson

It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease. ~ Samuel Johnson

As far as the style, I can't say there is one definite style. I probably feel most comfortable writing in a tonal idiom, with considerable, if not extreme chromaticism. ~ Marc-Andre Hamelin

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has! ~ Honore De Balzac

The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all. ~ Lydia Davis

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James) ~ Herbert A. Wise

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article. ~ Jon Weisman

Write visually or die! ~ Jim Steranko

All nonfiction writers, whether they like it or not, are translators. The translator is the perfect journalist. The best journalism endeavors to convey an essential idea or story to an audience that knows very little about it, and that requires translation. To do this successfully, the writer must filter the idea through the prism of his eye, and his mind, and his writing style. ~ Ilan Stavans

Yeah I was aware of the book, but hadn't read it. So as soon as I'd finished the script, I got a copy of the book and read that. My wife had read it and she loves it, so that was a good sounding board. I like her writing style, she's such a page-turner. I enjoyed The Constant Princess as well. I think she's great. The books are very popular with women and I can see why. ~ Eric Bana

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word. ~ Charles Stross

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards - an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them 'angels. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Other friends have said, "I don't understand why you've used this trumpet-style sound rather than a real one when you know you can write for trumpet." But it's most important to get the energy right. ~ Anna Meredith

Having done Spaced, I can't even remember it being that difficult on Spaced, but we know what the end's going to be like. We know why we're putting in this amount of work, or why a shot might be particularly tricky, because we know that what we do is create a whole package. It's the writing, the performances, and the style of camerawork, that's what we're working toward, and we're prepared for that. ~ Simon Pegg

I would describe my style of songwriting as classic. I learned very early on and have stuck to the core principles of song structure regardless of which genre I'm writing in. ~ Wendy Starland

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style. ~ Mark Twain

I think my books are lighter and funnier than some of the big series out there. You may not walk away from my books having learned a life-altering lesson, but you will feel better for having laughed for a few hours. It's just a different style of writing. ~ Molly Harper

A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet. ~ Ryan Adams

I consider myself more of a story teller than a writer. My readers constantly say that reading one of my stories is like watching a movie. That response comes from my writing style. I opt not to describe every object in a room or every detail of every character. I purposely leave room for my readers to inject their imagination into the details. The result is that my readers and I are unraveling the story together. It is like "interactive reading".
When we were young we were taught that reading is fundamental. As adults I believe reading should be fun. I hope you enjoy my stories…and thanks for your help along the way! ~ P.A. Morris

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style. ~ Ishmael Reed

The function of my comedy is not to provide answers, but to postulate questions, impertinent questions and therefore finally, pertinent questions. Not to open doors, merely to unlock them. To not invade the boundaries of probability but stabd a cool guard this side of the boundaries. Somewhere between there's a thesis. To pump up the muscle of dialectic (or in my case Di-Eclectic!) against the brawn of surrealistic solution.

I play not Hamlet, but the second gravedigger, not Lear but the fool. ~ Marty Feldman

I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read. ~ Sophie Calle

Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys. ~ Roy Peter Clark

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in. ~ Paul Simon

Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a "graphic" writing style combined with educational aims. ~ Charles Portis

Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can't be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator. ~ Sophie Hannah

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate. ~ Aristotle.

Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It it a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it. ~ Jonathan Barnes

Modernity of form is the style of old fogies yet to be. ~ Anthony Marais

In animation, you may be working with 20 writers, and everybody has to write the same thing. You can't have episodes that don't feel like they belong. In comics, you're gonna write a whole run, which means it's your style that's coming through. But when you're working on a show that's collaborated with a dozen other writers, you have to have a style that blends the show together. So you can't write it the way you normally would, because your script will stand out from all the others. ~ Marv Wolfman

Words are a means to an end. Those who chase after them inevitably fail to reach that end. ~ Anthony Marais

You have to know writing styles well before you can copy them - and then incorporate parts of them into your own style. ~ Josh Lieb

The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever. ~ Joseph Campbell

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The violence of Hegel's writing style consists in not allowing the reader to translate the conflicts of a proposition into the higher synthesis of a stable meaning. It interferes with the reader's wish to be done with the text…. Hegel frustrates the reader's desire to withdraw as quickly as possible from the contact with the other into the aloof identity and superior authority of the I. Speculative science asks us to "be with [zusammensein]" being (apprehended and articulated as subject) to sympathize with its self-disruption without losing our own beat, to join hands with it and dance. ~ Katrin Pahl

"There is no analysis here," the most brutal of them wrote. Now I wonder if my papers lacked critical thought, or if it was really more about my inability/refusal to write in the convoluted style that they wanted me to. I remember the initial shock upon reading my peers' papers. I seriously could not understand them, and I couldn't understand why the writing had to be so unclear in order to be considered smart. ~ Mary J. Miller

George Smith shows how many of the prophet's followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice ... [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style. ~ Daniel Walker Howe

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police. ~ Peter Selgin

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing - to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics - Well, they can do whatever they wish. ~ Isaac Asimov

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

I thought it had a very compelling opening, and after a couple of pages, I had that feeling of 'I'm in good hands,' and eager to see where this is going. I felt lots of intrigue, stakes, and conflict right from the outset, with a clear, terse writing style that drew me in right away.
--Erik Bork, Emmy Award winning screenwriter, Band of Brothers. ~ Robert Child

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene. ~ Oliver Markus

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest. ~ Horace Greeley

What's my writing style? Lazy. ~ Dan Alatorre

When my avocation became my vocation I was set free.

Writing, at first, was a hobby that I loved dearly. It turned into a serious endeavor several years ago when I started writing screenplays. Unfortunately selling one out of every ten was not very lucrative. Success comes in many forms and my poor returns from screenplays matured my writing style, ultimately affording me the ability to author hundreds of magazine articles that generated a decent paycheck.

Fast forward to today and I have published my first novel "The Alchemist's Notebook."

It is a whirlwind story in the style of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos that takes the reader from Vietnam to Innsmouth then Arkham and eventually to Europe wherein chaos and screaming terror awaits all living creatures on our planet.

I pledge to keep the reader on pins and needles hoping that sanity and normalcy will return.

"The Alchemist's Notebook" and all future novels along with my blogs will deal exclusively with that genre. ~ Byron Craft

The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

[writing to Stirling in 1740]
... an unlucky accident happened to some of the French mathematicians in Peru. It seems that they were shewing French gallantry to the natives' wives, who have murdered their servants destroyed their instruments and burnt their papers, the Gentlemen escaping narrowly themselves. What an ugly article this will make in a journal. ~ Colin Maclaurin

...carved marble figures in strata that "suggests the characters were made by intelligent humans from the distant past,"
a section of gold thread found in strata between 320 and 360 million years old,
a report in a nineteenth-century edition of Scientific American recording the discovery of a metallic vase in strata 600 million years old,
a chalk ball in France in strata 45-55 million years old,
a machined coin with undecipherable writing at least 200,000 years old, discovered in Illinois,
a clay figurine discovered in Idaho that is atleast two million years old.
The list of suppressed and conveniently forgotten discoveries goes on and on, ~ Joseph P. Farrell