Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
The essence of style is a simple way of saying something complex. — Giorgio Armani
Style has always been in my mind the author's Self, the creative expression of that Self. — Whit Burnett
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble. — John C. Ransom
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor. — Ogden Nash
Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches. — Logan Pearsall Smith
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. — David Crystal
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art. — Douglas Sirk
Writing Style Quotes
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. — Pablo Picasso
I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of. — Camila Cabello
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
Create your own visual style... Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms. — Patricia Lee Gauch
Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add. — Nelson Goodman
Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development — Stephen D. Krashen
In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read. — Sophie Calle
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. — Matthew Arnold
I drop styles on ears...the public bite 'em.
Not many went to school, so the dummies wouldn't write 'em.
They say, "Yo Keith! You're Kool, you usin' big words!"
I went to college, I'm even more stupid, herb. — Kool Keith
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
Literary Genre Quotes
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. — Pope Francis
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. — Ben Lerner
Fashions fade, style is eternal.
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. — Rick Moody
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. — Mark Haddon
The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature. — Peter James
Being happy never goes out of style.
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. — Marilyn Hacker
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. — Dean Koontz
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form. — Sue Grafton
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. — J. K. Rowling
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject — Claude C. Hopkins
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality. — Will Self
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. — Harriet Beecher Stowe
It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding. — H. L. Mencken
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug. — Cyril Connolly
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. — D. H. Lawrence
The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times. — Philip Schaff
Every single aspect of a text requires very careful choices and rigorous evaluation. Style is employed - or deployed - for a reason. It's purposeful. Form and aesthetics are part of meaning-making. Ideally, a writer would have mastery over a wide variety of rhetorical gestures and tonalities, our lexicon and punctuation system, our grammar, and all the riches of a liberal and literary education. — C.E. Morgan
Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. So DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous. You couldn't fit it into anything and that was the point. — DJ Spooky
To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write. — Philip Kitcher
Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation). — Philip Kitcher
Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch
I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres. — Isabel Allende
All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. — Donna Tartt
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed. — Anne Waldman
Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. — Henry David Thoreau
The Press nowadays is not a literary press; classic diction and brilliancy of style do not distinguish it by any means. — Marie Corelli
Your literary style reflects your personality. — Louis Auchincloss
Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is. — Zadie Smith
But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style. — Ali Smith
All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead. — Havelock Ellis
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world. — Charles Frazier
With the myriad of new Bible translations on the market today, few stand out. The ESV is one of the few, and surpasses the others in its simple yet elegant style. In many respects the ESV has accomplished in the 21st century what the KJV accomplished in the 17th: a trustworthy, literary Bible that is suitable for daily reading, memorizing, and preaching. — Daniel B. Wallace
Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate. — Ayn Rand
The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. — Machado de Assis
In Conclusion
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