Distinctive Writing Quotes

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

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

It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself.

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

My books are not generic. You know when you're reading a Joy Fielding book.

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.

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.