Terry Pratchett Quotes

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.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.

I think all writers have a style, a particular voice and rhythm that you have to find.

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

I've come to think of myself as a writer of books.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

Authors are influenced by everything they've ever read. If you've read widely enough, it helps you create your own mix.

I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.'

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

The treasure of a writer is to maintain their own style.

The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

Sometimes I'll be writing something, and I say to myself, 'Okay, that's definitely DTB,' or, 'It's definitely Strapping.'

I liked Hemingway better before I began to be called 'Hemingwayesque.'

I think I always have the same style. But if I see a trend long enough, I might catch on to it. But it has to be around for a while for me to warm up to it.

There are authors like David Foster Wallace or Raymond Chandler - with voice-based authors I might end up a completist, because what I love about them isn't just the particular construction of one novel or another but their flavor. There is an Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, as well. One book is not necessarily greater than another book, but they just have this incredible, unique voice, so it doesn't really matter which one you read.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.