Stylistic Quotes & Sayings

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm. — Penelope Lively

It's only when it's smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it - this incredibly complicated period when everyone's doing something different every day - that we look for those stylistic similarities and we say, "Well, that's what that was about," and sort of forget all the other nuance. I definitely feel that that's true for this time in my community of artists, and I'm sure that it was true at other times too. — Missy Mazzoli

Is it not a pity when some stylistic subtlety is lost without trace by the reader's inattention? — David Richards

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

It's funny: as a director, there are movies you make because you're passionate about getting your vision across, and you know that you're vision is different than anybody else. In those cases, you take the plunge, and it works, or it doesn't. You make the stylistic choices based on how you feel about the material. — Michael Lehmann

One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts. I feel that a filmmaker must go beyond the recording of facts. Moreover, I believe that Africans, in particular, must reinvent cinema. It will be a difficult task because our viewing audience is used to a specific film language, but a choice has to be made: either one is very popular and one talks to people in a simple and plain manner, or else one searches for an African film language that would exclude chattering and focus more on how to make use of visuals and sounds. — Djibril Diop Mambety

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer. — Sophie Hannah

I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I've sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions. — Julian Schnabel

In the '90s movies were so serious, and so stylistic and slick that I could not identify with them. — Michel Gondry

The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice. — Hirokazu Koreeda

My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. — Clark Ashton Smith

It's wrong to take even those occasional long sentences in the Quixote with loose structures, and subdivide, tighten and correct them because they are not instances of stylistic carelessness but examples of Cervantes's masterly creation of realistic dialogue: His amused observation of the deleterious effects of natural verbosity, or of passionate interest in the subject under discussion, on the speaker's grammar. — John Rutherford

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true. As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist's vision. — Roy Lichtenstein

The fact is that the buildings here were not made to speak to the world as we know it, but to the citizens of the USSR. Visible from afar and unfailingly spectacular, they are effectively monuments, ideological markers endowed with an almost mystical aura by their positioning in space and expressive power. "By its incongruity, by its inhuman stature" writes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, "the monumental dimension serves to emphasize the non-representable nature of the very concept that it evokes." This concept, whether in Grodno, Kiev or Dushanbe, is might. The might of power. A power that would soon become illusory and whose crumbling is indeed manifested by the growing stylistic diversity of this architecture. — Frederic Chaubin

We admire Freud for his serious dedication, his willingness to retract, the stylistic tentativeness of some of his assertions, his lifelong review of his pet notions. We admire him for his very deviousness, his hedging,s and his misgivings, because they seem to make him more of an honest scientist, reflecting truthfully the infinite manifold of reality. But this is to admire him for the wrong reason. A basic cause for his own lifelong twistings was that he would never cleanly leave the sexual dogma, never clearly see or admit that the terror of death was the basic repression. — Ernest Becker

I realized if I'm not really making an album, I don't have to be concerned about things like stylistic consistency, pacing, a coherent mood. All that stuff goes out the window. — John Oates

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides. — Philip Kitcher

The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes. — Nancy Pearcey

Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be found here in concentrated form. — Alasdair Gray

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all. — Peter Matthiessen

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues. — Antonya Nelson

Here are 3 stylistic quirks from Joe's repertoire:
1. noticing of smells
2. fixation on mouth/teeth
3. the use of lists — Sam Riviere

When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former. — Arne Glimcher

If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic ... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject. — David Salle

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone. — Oliver Stone

Stephen Shadley is a great collaborator. Over the years I've seen him work with a wide variety of clients and stylistic approaches. He listens to people in a way that makes them feel like they're part of the process. Steve is an inspiration on all fronts, and, believe me, that's a rare quality. — Diane Keaton

If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-deferential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention. — Alain De Botton

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. — Fredric Jameson

I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries. — David Bowie

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or — Robert Lane Greene

We're at this place where we're pushing the next stylistic envelope. — Anna Chlumsky

Write as precisely and as lucidly and as richly as you can about what you find truly mysterious and irreducible about human experience, and not obscurely about what will prove to be received opinion or cliche once the reader figures out your stylistic conceit. There's all the difference in the world between mystery and mystification. — Paul Harding

A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks himself about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems he proposes. — Helmut Jahn

It's much easier to make a movie with kind of stylistic pyrotechnics because you can hide behind that if there's a gap in the story. — James Gray

Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic. — Martin Filler

The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. — Michel De Certeau

I think with me and the type of music that I'm trying to make, it's always going be soulful because I grew up listening to different types and variations of soulful melodies and jazz, but experimenting with different types of stylistic souls. — Charlie Puth

Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside. — Brian Ferneyhough

A third characteristic is the deliberate multi-styled and heterovoiced nature of all these genres. They reject the stylistic unity (or better, the single-styled nature) of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, the lyric. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head. — Gustave Flaubert

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said ... of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. — Susan Sontag

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions. — Michael Tilson Thomas

Each moment calls for a different stylistic essence and a different sense of impact, and mastery of this balance is an art form - a very learnable art form. — Nina Garcia

I find three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (i) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness.
These three characteristics of the novel are all organically interrelated and have all been powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. — Mikhail Bakhtin

The early Bon Jovi stuff I can't stand. I just think we didn't have our stylistic voice. But some people love some of that stuff. — Richie Sambora

Vanity is an expressionless stylistic device. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Introduction!" And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something besides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared). So be assured - the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only won't stand in your way, I'll even agree with you! The novelet "Ender's Game — Orson Scott Card

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms. — Michael Haneke

Comics can definitely be subversive on the whole, but it's a stylistic thing. — Ted Alexandro

IN THE CINEMA A DIRECTOR EXPRESSES HIS INDIVIDUALITY FIRST AND FOREMOST THROUGH HIS SENSE OF TIME, THROUGH RHYTHM. RHYTHM GIVES COLOUR TO A WORK BY DISTINGUISHABLE STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS. RHYTHM MUST ARISE NATURALLY IN A FILM, A FUNCTION OF THE DIRECTOR'S INNATE SENSE OF LIFE AND COMMENSURATE WITH HIS QUEST FOR TIME. — Andrei Tarkovsky

The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance. — Billy Collins

[My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while generally sound, may be flawed in this instance. And they're a little miffed at my insistence ... — Richard Russo

If music leaves any impression at all, it does so without regard to stylistic issues. — Aulis Sallinen

fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (i) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified. — Neil Peart

I never considered myself an Americana artist, but I'm a huge fan of old-time music from the States, the recordings that were made in the '20s and '30s. Trying to chase down the exact stylistic trappings of that stuff always felt like a dead end. That spirit of directness and economy, but also the poetic pungency of the writing and almost ugly, or raw, performance - all that seemed like the real message. I've just tried to somehow stay true to that feeling. — Will Sheff

We haven't really changed, we've just gotten better at executing what we've always been trying to do. We're not really a band that has undergone huge stylistic decisions to change, we're just trying to follow the song. More and more, we let the song lead us - we don't try and put the song into a structure of our taste or our fashion. — Torquil Campbell

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right. — George Steiner

There may be some changes in building codes, but I don't see any stylistic departure that you'll be able to attribute to Sept. 11. — Cesar Pelli

The story entitled 'Good-Bye' is probably Tatsumi's most well-known work, and I think it's a good representation of many of Tatsumi's skills and stylistic tendencies. — Adrian Tomine

I'd always liked the idea that drama acts at its best as a kind of arena for debate, not just about the thing itself, but also producing aesthetic, stylistic, political and moral discussions. — Jeremy Northam

A filmmaker has to have great vision in order to tell a compelling story that is both distinctive and stylistic. I remember playing all movies in my head hundreds of times before they were ever made. You have to see it in your imagination. It has to be real to you. — Nicholas Ozeki

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying. — Christopher Moore

I guess I am conscious of my weaknesses, and I think pacing is probably my biggest. I don't know if I think the clarity thing is actually a weakness. It was a stylistic choice. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

The best answer I can give is that poetry is all about the effect it has on a reader, and Robert Frost was very, very good at that. If you're asking whatit MEANS that the line is repeated [and miles to go before I sleep] I'd have to say I don't know. It's stylistic. But the effect is pretty clear. — Haven Kimmel

During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent. — Martin Filler

I love hand-drawn animation, but I have to say I have fallen in love with CG animation. What you can do in terms of visuals is pretty stunning, and I think if I did go back and do a hand-drawn animation, I would want to make sure that, from a stylistic standpoint, it would be as beautiful as 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' at least! — Roy Conli

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails. — Karl Kraus