378 Style Quotes

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

My look is attainable. Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses, and the little sleeveless dresses.

The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?

Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic. Glamour is part of us, and we want to be dandy.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

I wanted to be in a band that gave bang for the buck. I wanted to be in the band who didn't look like a bunch of guys who, you know, should be in a library studying for their finals.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

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

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

We were told our campaign wasn't sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.

The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer.

I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.

In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness. (p. 102)

I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story - I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it - but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea' - is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.

Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

Animation is different from other arts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style

Style is whatever you want to do, if you can do it with confidence

The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the book of Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. ... In writing English the most important quality that you can acquire is style. It makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way.

I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language.

If you are going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy.

'Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,' she said, 'but that alone doesn't make it true.'

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.

Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor, Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.

I write music with an exclamation mark!

A sweet disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness.

A winning wave, deserving note, In the tempestuous petticoat, A careless shoestring, in whose tie I see a wild civility, Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.

The hair is real; it's the head that's fake.

Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent, Steinitz was very great too. Alekhine was great, but I am not a big fan of his. Maybe it's just my taste. I've studied his games a lot, but I much prefer Capablanca and Morphy. Alekhine had a rather heavy style, Capablanca was much more brilliant and talented, he had a real light touch. Everyone I've spoken to who saw Capablanca play still speak of him with awe. If you showed him any position he would instantly tell you the right move. When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since. Capablanca really was fantastic. But even he had his weaknesses, especially when you play over his games with his notes he would make idiotic statements like 'I played the rest of the game perfectly.' But then you play through the moves and it is not true at all. But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt.

The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard so universal. It is evidently the true goal of the English, as well as of the French bard; the goal from which we are but temporarily deflected during the preceding age. But exceptions should and must be made in the case of a few who have somehow absorbed the atmosphere of other days, and who long in their hearts for the stately sound of the old classic cadences. Well may their predilection for imperfect rhyming be discouraged to a limited extent, but to chain them wholly to modern rules would be barbarous. Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought - certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.

His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech.

I have recently re-read much of Chekhov and it's a humbling experience. I don't even claim Chekhov as an influence because he influenced all of us. Like Shakespeare his writing shed the most perfect light - there's no striving in it, no personality. Well, of course, wouldn't I love to do that!

Sometimes I read one of my stories, maybe one that I wrote thirty years ago, and I think, Now I'd go and do it differently. Or I think I would just alter a phrase that seems to me a little too polished or too sharp or too smart-aleck or something. Or too ironic. Irony was so big then that it got under your skin and you sort of didn't recognize it.

I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screening,so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else.

It doesn't matter if it displays Mona Lisa, a Banana or Hans Rittman's glasses - the fact is it must be pop!

We've been remarkably consistent, haven't lost a game and we have played stylish football. We have entertained people who just love football.

This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.

His opinion of verses. That he wrote all his first in prose, for so his master Camden had learned him. That verses stood by sense without either colours or accent; which yet other times he denied.

It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter.

Give a girl the correct footwear and she can conquer the world.

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

I don't play the old chess any more. The old chess is dead, it's been played out.

Because of styles, people are separated. They are not united together because styles became laws. But the original founder of the style started out hypotheses, and now it has become the grospel truth. People that go into them became their product. It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are structured, how you are built, how you are made. It doesn't matter. You just go in there and be that product. And that, to me is not life.

When people talk about fighting schools they say that Kung Fu, or Karate, or this other style is the best. That is silly, and the problem becomes that the fighting style then becomes set in stone with no growth, and no adaptation, because what works well with me might not work for you.

Perhaps because 'dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than 'dry' wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw him. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn't believe the man's grace.

Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.

The soul of Hogarth has migrated into the body of Dickens.

There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style.

We're not the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd. We're Linkin Park, and we cut all the fat out. We don't do guitar or drum solos.

Cyrano distills the most radical ideas of his time into a potent literary liqueur.

Diddy: (in the style of The Warriors)Breaaast milk, you made my dayyyyyyyay!

No animals were harmed in the flattening of my hair.

The rules of The Elements of Style were as simple to state - 'Omit needless words' - as they were difficult to obey.

Visitor: Monsieur Degas, were there any of Monet's pictures at the Durand-Ruel exhibition? Degas: Why, I met Monet himself there, and I said to him, 'Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!' His pictures were always too draughty for me. If it had been any worse I should have had to turn up my coat collar.

When Croft's 'Life of Dr. Young' was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, 'No, no,' said he, 'it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration.'

This boy had everything. He had the looks, the moves, the manager, and the talent. And he didn't look like Mr. Ed like a lot of the rest of us did. In the way he looked, way he talked, way he acted - he really was different.

'Elvis loved gospel music, he was raised on it, and he really did know what he was talking about; we would jam with him for an hour, and he had a feel for it and was 'tickled' to have four 'church sisters' backing him up; he was singing Gospel all the time, (in fact), almost anything he did had that flavour. You can't get away from what your roots are.'

'A double voice that alternates between a high quaver, reminiscent of Johnnie Ray at his fiercest, and a rich basso that might be smooth if it were not for its spasmodic delivery. 'Heartbreak Hotel', yelps the high voice, is where he's going to get away from it all. Answers the basso: 'he'll be sorry''

'(In Rockabilly), the vocal is another important aspect. It should be rough cut and edgy, but also sweet enough to milk the honey from a honey comb at times. Elvis could span several octaves with his voice, thus leaving almost no desires left towards the key of the song.'

'Elvis' songs can be heard everywhere worldwide, which is perhaps why everyone is familiar with his voice. When you hear a deep tuneful voice with a Southern drawl in a rock 'n' roll song, it can't be anyone but Elvis (in spite of that voice actually being that of someone else 'succesfully' mimicking him).

As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words - two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas - a series of ideas stuck together.

Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived that it becomes a miracle of style. As Hilaire Belloc once observed, the sly humor and philosophy of Bramah's stories is a trick he achieves by pretending to adapt the flavor of Chinese literary conventions into the English. But the thing I love most about the tales is their irony and the brilliance of their wit.

The way in which I depict people was now influenced very strongly by my third wife..and her sister.The beautiful,shapely architectonically structured bodies of those two girls,replaced the soft Saxon bodies.

He [ Titian ] is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias, one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand than to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion.