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.

I'm reminded of the incident in the early 1950s when a suddenly-timorous Jack Kerouac reportedly met Saroyan and exclaimed, 'So you're the man who wrote 'The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.' I've never forgotten that story!' That meeting, one could suggest, was inevitable. All the ingredients the Beats would incorporate into their canon had a germinal precedent in Saroyan's work: Rexroth's and Ferlinghetti's recognition of San Francisco's cultural civility and bohemian possibilities; Kerouac's interior monologues, frenzied energy and catch-all structureless narratives; and the Beat poets' looking toward the collected wisdom of Asia and its intermixed infusion of philosophical acceptance, respect for the earth and simplicity of style. ... It is difficult to conceive of the hippie phenomenon coming about without a Saroyan-like oeuvre as precursor ... what Saroyan added to the crucible of the writer defining his place upon the landscape was a remarkable insight into the creative process: Always walking the streets as if for the first time, noting nothing as insignificant and everything as meaningless, relishing the feel of the typewriter keyboard, crafting his words and himself as both a defiant and an absurd cackle at the universe.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Honey, try wearing a thong. Then you don't have to worry about all those panty lines.

You know what you look like with your good bag and your bad shoes? You look like a rube.

Prince : Game...Blouses.

I don't tan, I stroke.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

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've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, 'Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?' Tracy replied, 'What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?' You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.

I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.

Style is the dress of thoughts.

The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us...Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to 'popular' dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals...I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

Self-plagiarism is style.

I don't care how stylish something is if it doesn't flatter me.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

The law of simplicity and naivete applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

He speaks to me as no other philosopher does, direct and in his own human voice, a fellow spirit, a pentratingly perceptive friend, with a hand on my elbow and a twinkle in his eye.

He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

I'm a ham. I was immediately attracted to fencing because it seemed like a romantic, melodramatic form of combat.

I'll be arriving at the last possible minute and walking on stage raging and pillaging and then disappearing immediately afterwards.

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.

Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius (who in his turn had taken them from Debussy), was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed:In 1972, on a plane from New York to Toronto, I found myself sitting next to Duke Ellington, who spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the stature of Lambert.

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).

I preferred Diana's direction to the Queen's direction. The Queen is very 'Grrr' and Diana was slightly more 'Oh!'

He's quite confident for a bloke in a dress!

Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur?

Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

'George Best invented rock 'n' roll football' (Former France and Juventus midfield great Michel Platini)

The European boys have small ideas but they sure know how to dress 'em up.

Reporter: 'What do you call that hairstyle?' Harrison: 'Arthur.'

I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking.

We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

Between the choreographers and me, we kind of played with it. We wanted a bit of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire influence. It was totally choreographed and then I just made it sloppy.

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.

'Much of the music is a Merzbild, put together from whatever came to hand. I mean, for example...the Alberti-bass horn solo accompanying the Messenger. I also mean the fusion of such widely divergent types of music as the Folies Bergeres tune at No. 40 ('The girls enter, kicking') and the Wagnerian 7th-chords at Nos. 58 and 74.'

I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing - perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

Jack: I want to look tanned, not lumpy.

Bill is a good painter but he's a French painter.

Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying?

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

Respect movements, flee schools.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public pure cold water.

In his work a means of escape has been found from outmoded romanticism on the one hand and from a barren objectivity on the other.

UMBRIAGO! (Mentioned as one of Jimmy's Aquaintences, usually introduced in a boisterous manner)

As to matters of dress, I would recommend one never to be first in the fashion nor the last out of it.

The best way to execute french cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appetit.