Style’s Greatest Quotes

I’m a little late on the 5 for Friday, but I thought I’d
still have an installment of quotes from writers… So here they are: 5 writers
on STYLE from The Sound on The Page,
by Ben Yagoda. As Yagoda says, these are “Style’s Greatest Quotes.”

“The
style is the man. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself; and to
be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If
it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer
humor, it must be with inner seriousness. No other way will do.”

-Robert
Frost

“The
most durable thing in writing is style, and style if the most valuable
investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will
sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you
have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts
his individual mark on the way he writers will always pay off.”

-Raymond
Chandler

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

-Virginia
Woolf

“Your
own winning literary style must begin with interesting ideas in your head. Find
a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.
It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the
most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

-Kurt
Vonnegut

“If
one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive
thing, then of course style is really everything.”

-Mary
McCarthy

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