Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

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

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

Half your battle is won when the writing is good, and then you as an artist bring your personality into it.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.