Literary Style Quotes

• To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

  Mason Cooley

  Style

  8 Copy quote

• Your literary style reflects your personality.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Personality, Style

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Government

  Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (2010). “The Devil's Church and Other Stories”, p.11, University of Texas Press

  53 Copy quote

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• 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

  Clever, Style, Needs

  c.1910 Quoted in Alleyne Ireland An Adventure with a Genius, ch.4.

  113 Copy quote

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• 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

  Style, Ingredients, Lists

  Ali Smith: Style vs content? Novelists should approach their art with an eye to what the story asks, www.theguardian.com. August 18, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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• 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

  Spiritual, Style, Coincidence

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Lying, Past

  havelock ellis (1923). “the dance of life”

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• 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

  Writing, Voice, People

  4 Copy quote

• Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

  Claude C. Hopkins

  Writing, Unique, Style

  Dr. Robert C. Worstell, Claude C. Hopkins, John E. Kennedy, Albert D. Lasker “Scientific Advertising Origins”, Lulu.com

  20 Copy quote

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• 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

  Attitude, Black, Style

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Style, Stuff

  7 Copy quote