Writing Style Quotes

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

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!

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their own.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.