Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

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

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college.

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.

I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

If you are any kind of writer at all, you are in all of your writings.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Not even the severest critics of Jeffrey Archer can deny his style.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

You can read my stuff; there are not very many quotes. It's more impressionistic.

I still try to make the "next" book my "best" book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.