George Orwell Quotes

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

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.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

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

Clothes are like a good meal, a good movie, great pieces of music.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

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.

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.

Yeah, I love shopping and clothes but I don't live to shop.

Luxury is not about the things that you own. It is about something that reflects your personal values, something that shows the choices that you have made in your life.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

Just never really got into cars and flossin' or never really cared, like I was always the type of person that felt like as long as I make enough money to support my family with this music that's all I really care about. You know what I mean so I don't really buy, I'm just not into like that many material possessions and stuff like that, because at the end of the day, it's just not that important.

We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.

A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

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.

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice.