Writing Style Quotes

“Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.”
― Red Haircrow

“Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!”
― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

“I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.”
― Koren Zailckas, Fury: A Memoir

“Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.”
― Roman Payne

“There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

“Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.”
― Elmore Leonard, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

“A writer gets to live yet another life every time he or she creates a new story.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!”
― Lori R. Lopez

“Try as we might, we write what we write”
― bg Thurston

“Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards—an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them ‘angels.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It it a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.”
― Jonathan Barnes

“A writer’s voice emanates from their interest and compulsions that absorbs them completely. Only by fully committing himself or herself to a pet subject or issue can the writer develop a thematic tone that speaks to other people with authority and serenity. The quality of their literary voice is the crucial part of the writer’s legitimacy, and their authenticity cannot come from mimicking other writers’ style, but must evolve naturally from their inner sanctity and must flow effusively from an inner necessity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Only after becoming somewhat adept in a chosen field of study do most people feel comfortable developing their own distinctive style. More than one successful writer, for example, confessed to beginning their writing career by attempting to write in the same manner as the writers whom they admired. Artists, and other genuine people, are never truly comfortable in a fabricated role, living a life of mimicry, adhering to society’s preconceptions. Each person intuitively seeks to place the stamp of an emergent personality upon their greatest creation, the formulation of their self-identity. A person’s self-identity, similar to works of art, is autotelic, they reflect their maker, and are ends all unto themselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Write visually or die!”
― Jim Steranko, Visual Storytelling: The Art and Technique

“Clichés are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An essayist’s tone can be grim or playful, somber or teasing, and critical or uplifting. Unlike a thesis that a writer drafts to establish, verify, and support a proposition, a person primarily writes a personal essay to please oneself by questioning, probing, and investigating the mysterious, anomalous, and the unknowable wreckage of our humanity. A writer frequently initiates a personal essay by simply clearing their throat.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence. The writer must put no obstacles in the reader’s way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader’s mind.”
― Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance!: Or, More Properly, This Is "I"

“The function of my comedy is not to provide answers, but to postulate questions, impertinent questions and therefore finally, pertinent questions. Not to open doors, merely to unlock them. To not invade the boundaries of probability but stabd a cool guard this side of the boundaries. Somewhere between there's a thesis. To pump up the muscle of dialectic (or in my case Di-Eclectic!) against the brawn of surrealistic solution.

I play not Hamlet, but the second gravedigger, not Lear but the fool.”
― Marty Feldman, eYE Marty: The Newly Discovered Autobiography of a Comic Genius

“If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Writing is an effort at truth telling, but each person’s version of truth and his or her means of conveying it are unique. Writers’ talent and styles vary widely. Talent is more than merely raw ability; it also includes the quality of a person’s education, their knack for creativity, curiosity, openness to new ideas, personal experiences, and willingness to devote the time and self-discipline to their chosen field of interest. A writer’s style reflects the beating of a wild heart, the fire, and restless force to inquire. Writing style is ultimately a product of personality, praxis, and cultural history. Writing styles change throughout history because human knowledge increases with each passing era. New styles in writing and other forms of artistic expression must reflect changes in human comprehension.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer’s work product is the amalgamation of all the idiosyncratic components of the human mind including the lucid, cogent, and coherent, and the illogical, foolish, and absurd.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Commencing and concluding any writing project entails making certain compromises. A person must put off attending to other projects in order to devote him or herself to taking on an extensive writing project. The allocation of a writer’s limited resources of time requires choosing how much time to devote to any manuscript. One must stop working on a manuscript before it meets all the writer’s hopeful expectations.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“If I adhere to any fundamental principle in my writing, perhaps it is my belief that the function of fiction is essentially to amuse or entertain the reader. The mark of good writing, in my opinion, is that the reader is not aware that the story has been written; as he reads, the ideas and images flow into his mind as if he were living them. The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence.”
― Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance!: Or, More Properly, This Is "I"

“Indeed, what I feel, I write that, in my way of writing style. One agrees or disagrees; I respect both views; however, I stand and emphasize on my conception that devolves my vision and insight to others.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Then the auctioneer introduced himself [,,,,]. He started to speak into the microphone, a maddening, jammed-up sequence of words that crashed like bumper cars, after which everything sorted itself into some kind of sense again, and after the fact you could understand most of what he'd said.”
― Ann Beattie, The State We're In: Maine Stories

“One of Connolly’s lasting contribution to the debate is a one-word designation for prose that does not strive for the classical virtues of simplicity and clarity. He called it Mandarin. .... Connolly describes the Mandarin style’s reign in the nineteenth century, when its “last great exponents” were Pater and Henry James, and he has a plausible explanation for why James’s late novels, with their tortuous sentences and endless strings of metaphors, went virtually unread. James’s early works reached a small leisured collection of people for whom reading a book—usually aloud—was one of the few diversions of our northern winters. The longer a book could be spun out the better, and it was the duty of the author to spin it. But books got cheaper, and reading them ceased to be a luxury, the reading public multiplied and demanded less exacting entertainment, the struggle between literature and journalism began. Literature is the art of writing something that can be read twice; journalism what will be read once, and they demand different techniques. There can be no delayed impact in journalism, no subtlety, no embellishment, no assumption of a luxury reader, and since the pace of journalism is faster than that of literature, literature found itself in a predicament. It could react against journalism and become an esoteric art depending on the sympathy of a few, or learn from journalism, and compete with it.”
― Ben Yagoda

“Tanizaki’s subject requires the shadowy style in which he treats it”
― Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows