Prose Style Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.

Richard Armour

#3. Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.

Debby Applegate

#4. If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

Ishmael Reed

#5. The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.

George Brandis

#6. (Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man's prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.

Theodore Dalrymple

#7. The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

John Scott

#8. I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

Jeff VanderMeer

#9. Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson's first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.

Christine Schutt

#10. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

George Orwell

#11. My early prose style - this is so embarrassing - was sort of a suburban, Presbyterian knockoff of Woody Allen.

John Hughes

#12. 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

#13. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#14. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

James Patterson

#15. The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.

Conrad Williams

#16. [...] Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]

Charles Stross

#17. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Vladimir Nabokov

#18. I think you can talk forever about style, technique and beautiful prose, but surely in the final analysis one thing matters above all else - is it a page-turner?

Jamie Holoran

#19. All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

Jack Kerouac

#20. 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

#21. Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!

Lori R. Lopez

#22. Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

Edward R. Tufte

#23. most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable.

Marijn Haverbeke

#24. I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

Marguerite Young

#25. Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose.

A.J. Flowers

#26. To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write.

Philip Kitcher

#27. They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.

Stendhal

#28. The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#29. 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

#30. It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Haruki Murakami

#31. Avoid the suave flow of prose that's the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.

Guy Davenport

#32. My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me.

Neal Cassady

#33. Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Oscar Wilde

#34. I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

Val McDermid

#35. Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.

William Strunk Jr.

#36. At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'

Pete Hamill

#37. The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#38. Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.

Francine Prose

#39. It also makes the program more difficult to change because prose tends to be more tightly interconnected than code. This style is called literate programming. The

Marijn Haverbeke

#40. He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

John Crowe Ransom

#41. A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.

E.B. White

#42. When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

John Crowe Ransom

#43. The prose," Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

Hilary Mantel

#44. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish