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Writing Quotes

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Writing Quotes

“I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.”

Thinking Way Writing Believe Character Able I Believe My Own Attitude Style Events Originals Work Out Affected Good Writers

Author:Margaret Mahy

“Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.”

Way Writing Art Style

Author:David Hare

“By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.”

Book:Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

Source: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.”

Giving Writing Trying Reason Use Sound Style Perception Ordinary Sentences Objectives Reason Why Faithful Paragraph Transmit Being Faithful Synonym

Author:Martin Amis

“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.”

People World Writing Care Voice Style Particular Reader Strategy Novelists Ethical Footnotes Literary Style

Author:Zadie Smith

“Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.”

Source: Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected

“I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories.”

Writing Trying Facts Stories Style Pages Research Court Nonfiction Documents Thrillers Writing Nonfiction

Author:Ben Mezrich

“I think Taylor Swift is a really good artist. I feel like her personality shines through everything she does, her music, her fashion, her style. She won Album of the Year, and she’s a really good writer. I’m a song writer so I respect artists who write their own songs. She won Album of the Year when she was 18 or something like that so, I think she’s dope.”

Thinking Feels Writing Years Doe Artist Song Fashion Style Personality Shining Albums Dope Good Writers Like Her Good Art Good Artist

Author:Mike Posner

“The fact that I'm shouting that I have Gangnam style makes people crack up. Imagine if Brad Pitt was singing the song - would it be funny? A twist is important when it comes to writing lyrics.”

People Ifs Writing Important Facts Song Imagine Style Singing Cracks Twists Shouting Brad Gangnam Style

Author:PSY

“A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet.”

Writing Able Wanted Song Records Style Hearing

Author:Ryan Adams

“I got on the phone with the president of my label and I said, "Obviously, I write songs in a lot of styles and play a lot of different kinds of music. We're getting toward the end of our business collaboration. If you could envision a record that you wanted to hear from me, what kind of record would it be?" It wasn't like asking him to fill an order, it was really just a conversation. For all the things I'd ever asked him, this was one thing I'd never asked, and I don't know why. So I was curious. And the thing that he was most interested in hearing was a solo record.”

“I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.”

Thinking Want Writing Book Stories Reading Style Books And Reading

Author:Willa Cather

“An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.”

Writing Language Style Shyness

Book:Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise

“It's somewhat of a contradiction, .. I guess the quieter the voice, the more necessary it is to push it. It's not going to leap out at you and scream. I also can't control how a book is marketed. To say the book marketing is aggressive, fine, I'm happy with that. Push the book. That doesn't mean that my personality or writing style changes.”

Writing Mean Book Voice Style Fine Personality Marketing Contradiction Leap Aggressive Scream Writing Style

Author:David Bergen

“Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.”

Writing Today Artist Results Style Example Statements Vocabulary Spectacular Obscurity Writing Style Arcane

Author:Robert Genn

“A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.”

Writing Mind Whole Stories Powerful Teach Style Ten Pages Notion Dry Description Chapters Impress Vivid Textbooks Manuals Narration

Book:H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ Ultimate Collection: 120+ Works ALL in One Volume: Complete Novellas & Short Stories, Juvenilia, Poetry, Essays & Collaborations: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Outsider, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Cats of Ultharäó_

Source: H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ Ultimate Collection: 120+ Works ALL in One Volume: Complete Novellas & Short Stories, Juvenilia, Poetry, Essays & Collaborations: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Outsider, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Cats of Ultharäó_

“You have to know writing styles well before you can copy them - and then incorporate parts of them into your own style.”

Knows Writing Wells Style Copies Writing Style

Author:Josh Lieb

“I enjoy writing in a lot of different styles, so I pushed to find that vicious place, or that vulnerable place, and let it exist as intensely as I could.”

Writing Different Enjoy Style Vulnerable Vicious Different Styles

Author:Mikky Ekko

“For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.”

Men Writing Wells Three Style Exercise Speakers

Author:Ben Jonson

“Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.”

Knows Writing Kind Consciousness Style Streams Stream Of Consciousness

Author:Billy Bob Thornton

“A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.”

Writing Left Style Poet Touched Historian Naturalist

Author:Samuel Johnson

“Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.”

People Thinking Way Writing Mean Use Feelings Certain Attitude Seeing Influence Subjects Style Produce Reader Determination Atmosphere

Author:Randall Jarrell

“Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.”

Ifs Knows Writing Mean Has Beens Names Individual Practice Century Style Objects Periods Pursue Individualism Sole Imitation Conform Concealed Eccentricity Pseudo Individual Style

Author:Laura Riding