Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

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.

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.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

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.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

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

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.