Alexander Smith Quotes

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.

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.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

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.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

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

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

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

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

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.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Minor writers think style is all.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.

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

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

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.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.