Born With Style Quotes & Sayings

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style. — Albert Camus

Strunk was born in 1869, and today's writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century. — Steven Pinker

I think of my drawing style like handwriting: it's a mix of whatever handwriting you're born with, plus bits and pieces you've pilfered from other people around you. — Roz Chast

Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech. Ben Jonson and he did gather humors of men daily wherever they came. — John Aubrey

Football is a great love because I was born into a family of players and therefore born into football. I'm fortunate to have a style of play that a lot of people like. It's a privilege to be able to do what I like best and in my own way, but I'm fortunate that people like it, and that motivates me even more. — Ronaldinho

People like to say you're either born with style or you're not, and that's complete hooey. You've gotta develop your own and find your own.If you just put on whatever they're trying to sell you, you will always be out of fashion. Otherwise, they can't keep selling you. So, you will always be out of fashion. Get used to it. That's the game. Whatever they say is fashionable, chuck it. — Lauren Hutton

The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style. — Minae Mizumura

I've read that Steven Wright's style was born out of genuine nervousness. — Mike Birbiglia

And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they'd ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace's suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else. "Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. had countered. "Style, no substance, my friend." Harvey's face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. "You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you! — Gabrielle Zevin

We've been to secretive, perhaps. For long periods in our shared history, that was a necessity born from conflict. But it is not, I am prepared to accept, a style of living compatible with the modern age. It is difficult to maintain trust that way. Even among friends. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

There is no need to pose for anything - you just walk straight and strong and be clear. We are all born with unique characteristics and we have to stick to that. Yes, use the tools to enhance it, but we shouldn't be hiding behind them. That's what style is about. — Bibhu Mohapatra

Reference when we talked about Machiavelli, didn't you? I could've sworn you did." "Just because I don't enjoy it doesn't mean I know nothing about it. Tupac was around back in my wind-up phonograph days, you know." I cast her a sardonic look, which makes her laugh and shrug, as if to say 'hey, not my fault you're an old ass man.' "I'm surprised you know anything about him, actually. He died around the time you were born." "Yeah, well, music never really goes out of style, especially Tupac," she says with a smile. — J.M. Darhower

Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist. — Debby Applegate

Every woman is born with her own sense of style and idea of beauty. To stifle that is a sin as great as snuffing out a blossoming bud, a one-of-a-kind flower will never bloom again. — Toni Sorenson

'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style that mixed cartoons and 'traditional' writing, and that's how 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' was born. — Jeff Kinney

All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be. — Freya Stark

Fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt. — Elsa Schiaparelli

Yes," I continued, "I discovered this model recently and her style never fails to be mathematically perfect. She seems to come by it naturally. As if she were born resonant. I notice Japanese models tend to do this. Like I said, they seem to have resonance somewhere deep in their culture. But Yuri Nakagawa, she's the best I've ever seen. The best model, with the most powerful resonance. I need her to probe deeper
into this profound mathematical instinct, which I call resonance. — Alexei Maxim Russell

What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches. — Octavio Paz

I should have lived through the '80s, not been born in it. My style is a mix of hip-hop and '80s casual. — Michael Socha

I don't think my background in Zambia has really affected my lens because my classical training has been Western-style. But it's fantastically fortuitous to have been born African because I don't feel I have a vested interest to the U.S. or China or wherever. — Dambisa Moyo

Your new kitchen should look like it was "born there." That doesn't mean it has to be the exact same style as the house. (You can put a modern kitchen into a Victorian, for example.) It just means that it has to complement the spaces around it. — Jamie Gold

Age, style, where you come from, where you were born, it's different every time, which, to me, is refreshing because it says that there isn't any one thing, one formula or kind of character that makes a great comedian. Everybody has had a different approach. — Alan King

If I'm wearing jeans all day at work, it's [hard] to slip into a dress and make yourself feel like you were born in it. That sort of thing can really be the difference between a good look and a great look. You can have a great dress, but when you put it on and you feel like it's embodying who you are that day, that's not just fashion, that's style! — Debby Ryan

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. — Vladimir Nabokov

In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man". — Lawrence Durrell

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. — Thomas Ligotti

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. — Austin Kleon