Writing Style With Quotes

#1. 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

#2. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)

Kurt Vonnegut

#3. When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things; first, that such persons do not understand themselves; and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.

Charles Caleb Colton

#4. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine's Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f - k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard - why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending).

Lynn Povich

#5. I learn so much from writing with other musicians, asking questions about their playing style and gear, and hanging out, too.

Lisa Loeb

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

James Frey

#9. Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

Lytton Strachey

#10. People are writing shorter jokes. The style I've started with was almost trying to keep jokes under 140 characters before Twitter.

Nick Thune

#11. 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

#12. Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

Molly Antopol

#13. In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Mitch Albom

#14. Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. You are in love with my husband. You need some acting lessons to learn to hide it better.

Mary Papas

#16. 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

#17. Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line - right-to-left, then left-to-right. Brilliant! The eye doesn't waste time trekking back to the left side of the page after every line.

A. J. Jacobs

#18. There's nothing wrong with the screaming style of singing, and I'll be the first to admit that it conveys an emotion. But I'm getting older, and I can't scream and shout about the same things anymore. The songs I'm writing with Stone Sour call for a lighter, different approach.

Corey Taylor

#19. Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

John Patrick Lowrie

#20. Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson ... Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

Sydney J. Harris

#21. 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

#22. To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt

#23. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.

Dorothy Parker

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.

Fred Rodell

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

Charles Darwin

#34. 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

#35. From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?

David H. Millar

#36. 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

#37. My comics have changed so much over the years, in the writing, in art style, sometimes incrementally, sometimes quite suddenly. So I've cultivated an audience who will go along with me because they trust me.

John Allison

#38. I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.

William Faulkner

#39. 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

#40. I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough.

Marilynne Robinson

#41. Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.

Isaac Asimov

#42. The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

Raymond Chandler

#43. In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm

Gustave Flaubert

#44. There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.

Truman Capote

#45. Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

Anne McCaffrey