A style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing.
— BERTRAND RUSSELL
Every great and original writer, in proportion that he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.
The test of LUCIDITY is whether the statement can be read as meaning anything other than what it intends. Military orders should be, and often are, models of lucidity.
ELEGANCE is the quality in a work of art which imparts direct pleasure; again not universal pleasure. There is a huge, envious world to whom elegance is positively offensive. English is incomparably the richest of languages, dead or living. One can devote one’s life to learning it and die without achieving mastery. No two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation.
INDIVIDUALITY needs little explanation. It is the hand-writing, the tone of voice, that makes a work recognisable as being by a particular artist.
Permanence is the result of the foregoing. Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable. We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them. They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered—that is to say because they are lucid, elegant and individual.
— EVELYN WAUGH
One of the chief elements of power in Gothic, and in all good architecture, was the acceptance of uncultivated and rude energy in the workman.
— JOHN RUSKIN
I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, ‘This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,’ you’re sunk.
— P.G. WODEHOUSE
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
— KURT VONNEGUT
The novelist has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast smouldering rubbish heap of experience, half-stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.
Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.
— EVELYN WAUGH
All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences.
— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
My real criticism is that the book owes its origins to an impulse to write a book, not this particular book. Your imagination was not so obsessed by your subject that it had to find literary expression. And that is the only way—at least while you are learning the trade—that a good book can result.
— EVELYN WAUGH
On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
I remind myself that I must take some work as the whole end of life and not think as others do of becoming well off and living pleasantly.
— W.B. YEATS
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Any audience, as a rule, goes for a fast number.
— ELVIS PRESLEY
INTERVIEWER: If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?
WODEHOUSE: I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed.
Write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is your style.
— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
I rather feel that the less writers are always examining themselves in that sort of way, the better. I don’t think you ought to be thinking, Well, am I writing like this? Or writing like that? I think you just want to try to write as well as you can. It’s above all a question of instinct.
— ANTHONY POWELL
To me, the most valuable capital a writer has is time. Time to write, time to learn his craft, time to get better. Money exists to protect that time. … Money exists, in my world, to buy me another season.
— MICHAEL PRESSFIELD
What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.
— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Though the practice of his art may afford a writer his chief pleasure, no less than his principal and constant source of worry, though, too, a sudden inspiration may constitute his greatest luxury, yet a minute account of this, his real existence, would—could only be—of but slight interest to the reader. How is it possible to picture for him the quotidian miseries and splendours of a life attached to the inkpot, the many months spent at a table, the hours when every disturbance is furiously resented, the other, more occasional moments when every interruption is welcome, the evenings, when an author looks on his work and finds it good, or those frequent nights when it seems to him to have fallen unbelievably short of what he had intended, the inflations of self-conceit and the agonies of self-reproach, the days when everything grows to giant proportions because it has meaning, the afternoons when all dwindles to pygmy and shows none? What of the racked and sleepless hours before the dawn? Who would wish for a book composed of these?
— OSBERT SITWELL
A style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Every great and original writer, in proportion that he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.
The test of LUCIDITY is whether the statement can be read as meaning anything other than what it intends. Military orders should be, and often are, models of lucidity.
ELEGANCE is the quality in a work of art which imparts direct pleasure; again not universal pleasure. There is a huge, envious world to whom elegance is positively offensive. English is incomparably the richest of languages, dead or living. One can devote one’s life to learning it and die without achieving mastery. No two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation.
INDIVIDUALITY needs little explanation. It is the hand-writing, the tone of voice, that makes a work recognisable as being by a particular artist.
Permanence is the result of the foregoing. Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable. We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them. They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered—that is to say because they are lucid, elegant and individual.
EVELYN WAUGH
One of the chief elements of power in Gothic, and in all good architecture, was the acceptance of uncultivated and rude energy in the workman.
JOHN RUSKIN
I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, ‘This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,’ you’re sunk.
P.G. WODEHOUSE
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
KURT VONNEGUT
The novelist has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast smouldering rubbish heap of experience, half-stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.
Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.
EVELYN WAUGH
All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
My real criticism is that the book owes its origins to an impulse to write a book, not this particular book. Your imagination was not so obsessed by your subject that it had to find literary expression. And that is the only way—at least while you are learning the trade—that a good book can result.
EVELYN WAUGH
On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
I remind myself that I must take some work as the whole end of life and not think as others do of becoming well off and living pleasantly.
W.B. YEATS
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Any audience, as a rule, goes for a fast number.
ELVIS PRESLEY
INTERVIEWER: If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?
WODEHOUSE: I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed.
Write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is your style.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
I rather feel that the less writers are always examining themselves in that sort of way, the better. I don’t think you ought to be thinking, Well, am I writing like this? Or writing like that? I think you just want to try to write as well as you can. It’s above all a question of instinct.
ANTHONY POWELL
To me, the most valuable capital a writer has is time. Time to write, time to learn his craft, time to get better. Money exists to protect that time. … Money exists, in my world, to buy me another season.
MICHAEL PRESSFIELD
What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Though the practice of his art may afford a writer his chief pleasure, no less than his principal and constant source of worry, though, too, a sudden inspiration may constitute his greatest luxury, yet a minute account of this, his real existence, would—could only be—of but slight interest to the reader. How is it possible to picture for him the quotidian miseries and splendours of a life attached to the inkpot, the many months spent at a table, the hours when every disturbance is furiously resented, the other, more occasional moments when every interruption is welcome, the evenings, when an author looks on his work and finds it good, or those frequent nights when it seems to him to have fallen unbelievably short of what he had intended, the inflations of self-conceit and the agonies of self-reproach, the days when everything grows to giant proportions because it has meaning, the afternoons when all dwindles to pygmy and shows none? What of the racked and sleepless hours before the dawn? Who would wish for a book composed of these?
OSBERT SITWELL
