Elmore Leonard Quotes

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail.

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

I like to play with tropes.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.