Elmore Leonard Quotes

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.

I don't have a style. I wouldn't say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said "This is what he does," but when I'm writing, I don't think about that. I don't think about a style.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

I have this natural thing in my head that when I sit down to write something serious, I tend to make jokes. I can't help it. I can't help but desire for the narrative to be as complicated and as truthful as possible. That's just the way my head works.

As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.

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.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

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.

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 feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

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.

Shaw writes as if it were always midday.

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.

To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

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.

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

I'm not a speed writer. I write slowly and revise obsessively. The end result tends to be good. That's where my strength is.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.