Interlude
Style’s Greatest Quotes

It is not surprising that, like love and war, style should have inspired the best writers and thinkers to say interesting and memorable things. It is, after all, the medium in which they exist. Here is a selection, arranged alphabetically by author surname.

WHEN A PHRASE IS BORN, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice…. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

—Isaac Babel, in the short story “Guy de Maupassant”

STYLE IS NOT MUCH A MATTER OF CHOICE. One does not sit down to write and say: Is this poem going to be a Queen Anne poem, a Beidermayer poem, a Vienna Secession poem or a Chinese Chippendale poem? Rather it is both a response to constraint and a seizing of opportunity. Very often a constraint is an opportunity…. Style enables us to speak, to imagine again. Beckett speaks of “the long sonata of the dead”—where on earth did the word sonata come from, imposing as it does an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us? The fact is not challenged, but understood, momentarily, in a new way.

—Donald Barthelme

FOR MYSELF, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist’s sensibility—more so than the content of his work. To some degree all writers have style—Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and thank God he realized it. But the possession of style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, not as it should be, and as it is—with, say E.M. Forster and Colette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen—a reinforcement. Dreiser, for instance, has a style—but oh, Dio buono! And Eugene O’Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as he is. They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader.

—Truman Capote

THE MOST DURABLE THING IN WRITING IS STYLE, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

—Raymond Chandler

STYLE IS A RELATION BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT. Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant. The more ignorant a writer feels, the more artificial becomes his style. A writer who thinks himself cleverer than his readers writes simply, one who is afraid they are cleverer than he, will make use of mystification: good style is arrived at when the language chosen represents what the author requires of it without mystification.

—Cyril Connolly

THE STYLE IS THE MAN. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself; and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. No other way will do.

—Robert Frost

FOR THE GENUINE AND SINCERE WRITER, everything he writes is in high style: he means every line with the maximum of intensity, and is apt to become exasperated with readers whose reception of his work is tepid or selective.

—Northrop Frye

A STYLE IS A RESPONSE to a situation.

—Richard Lanham

IF ONE MEANS BY STYLE THE VOICE, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

—Mary McCarthy

THE TEST OF A TRUE individuality of style is that we should feel it to be inevitable; in it we should be able to catch the reference back to a whole mode of experience that is consistent with itself. If this reference is perceptible to us, it will be accompanied by a conviction that the peculiarity of style was necessary, and that the originating emotion of which we are sensible demands this and this alone.

—John Middleton Murry

AN ORIGINAL STYLE is the only true honesty any writer can ever claim.

—Vladimir Nabokov

STYLE IS A THINKING OUT into language.

—John Henry Cardinal Newman

THE ATTAINMENT OF A STYLE consists in so knowing words that one will communicate the various parts of what one says with the various degrees and weights of importance which one wishes.

—Ezra Pound

IT WAS FROM HANDEL THAT I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke, you have style.

—George Bernard Shaw

IT IS ONLY THROUGH STYLE FINALLY—through language—that any writer can be original. All the themes are old.

—Lee Smith

STYLE IS THIS: to add to a given thought all the circumstances fitted to produce the whole effect which the thought is intended to produce.

—Stendhal

YOUR OWN WINNING LITERARY style must begin with interesting ideas in your head. Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

—Kurt Vonnegut

THE THREE NECESSARY ELEMENTS OF STYLE are lucidity, elegance, individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters…. Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable. We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them. They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered—that is to say because they are lucid, elegant and individual.

—Evelyn Waugh

STYLE IS THE ULTIMATE MORALITY of mind.

—Alfred North Whitehead

STYLE IS A VERY SIMPLE MATTER; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.

—Virginia Woolf