William Safire Quotes

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

I need a consistency of my moods if there is to be any consistency in my style. I can't attempt to write always in the hollow flux of desperation and incipient terror.

I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.

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.

The other big factor in building trust quickly is site design quality. Mint.com has one of the best graphic designers ever (Jason Putorti) - he cares about every pixel, all the fonts, all the transparencies and effects. And that shows instantly. People do make judgments of trust on appearance - in the real world and online.

I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

I notice people that look good.

I do like a song that can look good on a page without even being sung. I edit and edit and edit.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

It is better to look good than to feel good.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

He already knows what I look like," Cath said. "There's no point in being tricky about it now." "How is doing your hair--and maybe putting on some lip gloss--being tricky?" "It's like I'm trying to distract him with something shiny.

I have always felt my role as a designer is to do the very best I can for a woman to make her look her best. Fashion is only fashion once a woman puts it on.

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.

Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!

With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.