Randall Jarrell Quotes

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.

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

I always knew from the beginning that this was the only way to write Then We Came To The End - that it had to be in first - person plural if it was going to illustrate how the individual becomes part of the collective. I had no interest in writing the book in a more conventional voice. It goes back to that fascination I had with telling a story in multiple ways. It was the only choice I gave myself, really - I said "This is it, pal. If you can't tell a story this way, you're going to have to abandon the book. Write it this way or give up."

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

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

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.

Clichés are what good writing is all about. Because our lives are basically clichés.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

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.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

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.