Style Over Substance Quotes

It is better to look good than to feel good.

Why did they keep changing guitars and amplifiers when they were perfect? They did the same things with cars, if you ask me. They forgot how to make them right, because they focused on style and bells and whistles.

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.

At Anderlecht, if you don't win in style, it means nothing.

The European boys have small ideas but they sure know how to dress 'em up.

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

Rock & Rollers don't dress for the weather.

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.

The Tao of Jen was very much the Tao of hiding everything that didn't look good. The Tao of Jen is wearing a cocktail dress with underwear with holes in it. The Tao of Jen is all style and no substance.

When I think back to my influences and icons musically, they were my icons musically because, for example, I would look at Rakim and be like man he said the freshest things and then I look at him and he would have on the pair of Nikes that I wanted and I'm like, "ma' please!" It was everything. Now, I sort of feel like if you are fresh then your music doesn't have to be that good because people are so keyed into the fashion. That's just the times I guess.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom.

That was excellent! I mean, it didn't do anything, but it looked really cool!

The fault of bad taste is usually in over-dressing. Quality not effect, is the standard to seek for.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

Playing quarterback ... it's no joke ... The difference here with Johnny Manziel, there's a lot of style and very little substance.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable.

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think.