Selected style quotes

1. 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.

2. Layeth the smacketh down.

3. 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.

4. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

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

6. 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.

7. 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.

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

9. The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

10. 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.

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

12. Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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

16. And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

17. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

18. Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

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

20. 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.

21. Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

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

23. 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.

24. 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.

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

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

27. The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

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

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

30. 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.

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

32. 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.

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

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

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

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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?

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

40. 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.

41. We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't 'us' at all.

42. No one shakes their bon-bon like I do, except Ricky [Martin].

43. This is brave Bear-Garden language!

44. People call me an over-actor, people who say this might call Van Gogh an over- painter.

45. Dr. Kettle was wont to say that Seneca writes as a Boare does pisse, scilicet by jirkes.

46. Men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it is good enough.

47. The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.

48. Also Johnn Lydgate Wryteth after an hyer rate; It is dyffuse to fynde The sentence of his mynde, Yet wryteth he in his kynd, No man that can amend Those maters that he hath pende; Yet some men fynde a faute, And say he wryteth too haute.

49. In images of horror, and in a certain terrible greatness, our author comes far behind Chaucer. Whether they were not suited to the genius or the temper of Lydgate, I do not determine; but it is certain that, though they naturally seemed to present themselves, he has almost generally chose to avoid them: yet is there frequently a stiller kind of majesty both in his thought and expression, which makes one of his principal beauties.

50. A soundbite never buttered any parsnips.

51. Some very bad trousers indeed.

52. As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of the bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight as a bullet.

53. For though my ryme be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rayne beaten, Rusty and moughte eaten, It hath in it some pyth.

54. Little and hairy. But if [The New York Post] want to go with smart and stylish then hey, more power to them. Good luck.

55. Clearly, I like to poke fun.

56. Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.

57. Style is the thought itself.

58. Loving her, Monsignore, I love all her attributes; But I believe That even if I did not love her I would love the blueness of her eyes, And her blue garment, made in the manner of the Japanese.

59. I want to be a Mrs. Kenny Rogers kind of woman. You know... the kind of lady he sings about: 'Oh Lady, I was just scum in the sewer until you came along and made me a man.' With hair that's light, but not really blonde, that would be too cheap. Instead, sort of a wheat-and-sunstreaked affair with not a lot of hairspray. A ninety-five dollar cut that looks like your hair just naturally grows out of your head like that. The kind of woman who always, no matter what, has that I-understand-and-am-knowing-without-being-threatening kind of always smile.

60. Kesey practices what has come to be known as gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism.

61. Her style looks absurdly simple- an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable. (p. 215)

62. 5) If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exoticor genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it then, let it not be your fault.

63. Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives. :-)

64. I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right.

65. My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was not the desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

66. As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird, Since it lives in perpetual passion: Its taste in costume is entirely absurd - It is ages ahead of the fashion.

67. His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering.

68. Of all the elements combined in the complex of signs labelled Margaret Thatcher, it is her voice that sums up the ambiguity of the entire construct. She coos like a dove, hisses like a serpent, bays like a hound [in a contrived upper-class accent] reminiscent not of real toffs but of Wodehouse aunts.

69. [She has a] patronising elocution voice [and] neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just low. [It fills me with] a kind of rage.

70. Had Shakspeare and Milton lived in the atmosphere of modern feeling, had they had the multitude of new thoughts and feelings to deal with a modern has, I think it likely the style of each would have been far less curious and exquisite. For in a man style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age. In the 17th century it was a smaller harvest than now, and sooner to be reaped; and therefore to its reaper was left time to stow it more finely and curiously. Still more was this the case in the ancient world. The poet's matter being the hitherto experience of the world, and his own, increases with every century.

71. The Celts certainly have it [style] in a wonderful measure.

72. The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:-that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.

73. I like looser clothes, which always prompts my mom to say something classic like, 'You have such a darling figure - show it off more!'

74. 'Man, that's my style!' -- When asked by the producer of 'Tears Are Not Enough' (the Canadian counterpart to 'We Are The World') to sing his line again because it sounded 'a little flat'.

75. Her descriptions of food can be a tangle of adjectives.

76. Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern what they are leaving out. The answers become clear enough, he says. The catch is they won't be the ones we want to hear. [...] Chomsky, as he often does, has a voice problem. He is shrill and sarcastic--chiefly because he's angry with what he sees as rampant American hypocrisy. [...] If there is anything new about our age, it is that the questions Chomsky raises will eventually have to be answered. Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening. --BusinessWeek, April 17, 2000 [189]

77. If you write like James Joyce, you will have an audience of twenty. The other nineteen - besides your mother, because your father won't read it - will only be reading it to find out how on earth you got published.

78. ll est extraordinaire qu'on puisse mettre tant de mystere dans tant d'eclat.

79. Jamais je n'ai voulu et je n'accepterai le manque de modele ou de graduation. C'est un non-sens. Gauguin n'etait pas un peintre, il n'a fait que des images chinoises.

80. The popular fancy that Gauguin 'discovered himself' as a painter in Tahiti is quite wrong. All the components of his work - the flat patterns of colour, the wreathing outlines, the desire to make symbolic statements about fate and emotion, the interest in 'primitive' art, and the thought that color could function as a language - were assembled in France before 1891.

81. 'I'll tell you what let's do'.

82. De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.

83. If only for esthetic reasons, I am not overfond of the term 'Bottom-Up Management.'

84. The duty of the artist is to strain against the bonds of the existing style.

85. I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

86. Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

87. His dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging 'equanimity' that weakens the style and temperament of so many of our serious writers. His murderous intuitive phrases are famous; but at the same time his mind is essentially conservative and takes as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre one.

88. Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.

89. My sound is really a fusion of reggae, hip-hop and R&B, with a little something different thrown in.

90. Everytime I come to New York, I get tempted to do something weird, like getting a piercing or a tattoo.

91. By far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolano's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English... His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

92. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie is a good one and there are talented people in the cast, what we have here is a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style.

93. Is xXx a threat to the Bond franchise? Not a threat so much as a salute. I don't want James Bond to turn crude and muscular on me; I like the suave style. But I like Xander, too, especially since he seems to have studied Bond so very carefully.

94. If you close your eyes, you could just as well imagine me to be vintage Ali MacGraw, circa 1968.

95. Dear God, she was beautiful. Sharon was more beautiful as a teenager than she was in her twenties; in Europe people would turn around on the street just to look at her.

96. I'm surprised at the reaction it got. I went down there and did exactly what I wanted. I didn't expect it to be some sort of cultural-political line in the sand. I did the style of jokes I'd been doing for six months. The fact that anybody found it surprising or alarming that I would do that was educational to me.

97. 'I like Steve's style because his style is my style.'

98. Styles change, style doesn't.

99. The show is much more emotional now. It's a journey, but it is still about clothes, too. It's been fascinating to see how looking good and having faith in your appearance makes you into a sexier person, which makes you attractive to your partner again. We come in as complete strangers and get to know them all extremely well. It was a privilege for Trinny and I to have these people feel they could open up to us. It was very humbling, too.

100. For us, it's all about shape, and how that is going to cure a bodily defect.