Top 100 Quotes About Writing Style
#1. I went through a big Alice Cooper phase, which was probably a major influence on my writing style later, especially after Plastic Surgery Disasters.
Jello Biafra
#2. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities ... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.
Robert Genn
#8. Ms. Taylor's writing style is clear, without frills, and so streamlined that her story flows and flows and flows, without taking a break, to its satisfying conclusion.
Maeve of Tara
Vicki M. Taylor
#9. Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
Jewel
#10. I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
#12. I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive.
Claire Danes
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.
Julia Quinn
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Philippe Le Douarec
#19. 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
#20. After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
Iris Chang
#21. Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.
Eileen Myles
#22. 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
#23. My writing style has changed dramatically over the years, growing increasingly clean and exact. I like to think that I'm still improving
that each book I write is a new personal best.
Barbara Delinsky
#24. 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
#25. A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
#26. I think talking is as casual as blogging, and sometimes writing can be as casual as talking. My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.
Jessica Valenti
#27. 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
#28. Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development
Stephen D. Krashen
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Writing style can be descriptive without being wordy - and wordy without being descriptive
Rayne Hall
#32. Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.
Sting
#34. 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
#35. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
Robert Bringhurst
#36. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
P.D. James
#37. 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
#38. It is in writing of the emotions that style becomes most individual, in moments of passion, betrayal, of life and death.
Hallie Burnett
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
Kenzaburo Oe
#43. You can find me in the melodies, the chord progressions, the song style and structure. The lyrical places you fine me most are in the lyrics that 'show' more than 'tell.' I like to describe what the listener is seeing and let them make up the middle rather than telling them.
Kristian Bush
#44. For me, all writing
storytelling and style
gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.
Dennis R. Miller
#45. Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.
Stanley Schmidt
#46. I have so many songs, it's ridiculous. I love so many different types of music and tend to write all over the map, style-wise. R&B, rock 'n' roll, screamers, pop, good-time songs.
Taryn Manning
#47. There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.
Fred Rodell
#48. I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Willa Cather
#49. 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
#50. Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
Nancy Kress
#51. 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
#53. I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.
William Shenstone
#54. Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
Elizabeth Bowen
#55. 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
#56. If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
#57. Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.
Lynne Tillman
#58. I am in no way a confident person - except when it comes to what I'm writing. It's just like, this is what I can do, and I have what I think is a pretty strong voice, for better or worse. It's the style I like to write in.
Megan Amram
#59. We achieve originality of style not by avoiding the influences of others but by blending them into a combination that has not been heard before.
Scott Norton
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.
Rudyard Kipling
#64. The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#65. 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
#66. Many intelligent people, when about to write ... , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#67. A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.
John Steinbeck
#68. I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.
Francois Cluzet
#69. I love my style of writing. Nope, it's not the most poetic stuff you've ever read but you know, it can evoke emotions and images and smells and sensations, and that is what I set out to do.
Erin M. Truesdale
#70. I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.
Norman Mailer
#71. 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.
Big Smo
#72. I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.
Jane Austen
#73. As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars." "And what are they?" "A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.
Jane Austen
#74. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
David Hare
#75. 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
#76. I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.
George Saunders
#77. So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."
Isaac Asimov
#78. Comedians are people who embarrass themselves in style.
A.D. Posey
#79. An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.
Alain De Lille
#80. Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.
Charles Mingus
#81. 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!
Hans Christian Andersen
#82. Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.
Charles Darwin
#83. I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.
Lori R. Lopez
#84. Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
#85. A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.
Suzanne Curchod
#86. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
Vladimir Nabokov
#87. Do your best to maintain an authentic style of writing. If you are a serious person, be serious. If you are a comic, be funny. Do not choose a style or a tone that is different from the person you really are.
Gudjon Bergmann
#88. Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
Derek Raymond
#89. There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.
Horace Walpole
#90. Author branding is the process of positioning an author as the center of attraction and influence, to be the preferred choice in a given theme, style, category, niche or genre
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#92. My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.
Craig Finn
#93. Writing songs is really about writing. It's not about necessarily focusing on one particular style or making it one particular thing.
Jann Klose
#94. A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
Ernest Hemingway,
#95. good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments.
Stephen King
#96. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.
William Hazlitt
#97. 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
#98. Do not copy my style! The first rule of writing is write about what you know, not what you think you know. So, think about what you've done in your life and write about that.
Jackie Collins
#99. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style, - which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity
Cyril Connolly
#100. 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
