Quotes About Literary Style

#1. All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

Havelock Ellis

#2. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Charles Frazier

#3. The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness.

Jerome K. Jerome

#4. Your literary style reflects your personality.

Louis Auchincloss

#5. To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

Mason Cooley

#6. Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

Claude C. Hopkins

#7. But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.

Ali Smith

#8. All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable ...

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#9. What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

Joseph Pulitzer

#10. A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won't really be pure.

Gunter Grass

#11. I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#12. Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

Roman Payne

#13. 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

#14. The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

Philip Schaff

#15. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

Nicholas Carr

#16. Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.

Stephen Spender

#17. If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred.

Baruch Spinoza

#18. Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Roman Payne

#19. Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context.

DJ Spooky

#20. 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

#21. Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.

Vikram Seth

#22. The Press nowadays is not a literary press; classic diction and brilliancy of style do not distinguish it by any means.

Marie Corelli

#23. I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Garry Disher

#24. Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.

Michael Dirda

#25. 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

#26. Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

James Shapiro

#28. Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

Richard Dawkins

#29. Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.

Vladimir Nabokov

#30. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

Ayn Rand

#31. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

George Orwell

#32. I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

Isabel Allende