Writing Tone Quotes

Tone is a very difficult thing. You can't write tone, I don't think. You can try - you certainly try. I write too, so I know I'm trying desperately to communicate to whoever's going to direct my pieces, the way I see the humor. But it's very difficult.

The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.

We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

Even when I think I'm writing really young, they say it's too mature.

If you tell the reader it's funny, then the audience is like an audience at a stand-up comedy club and they expect you to be funny, and if you're not, they notice. Whereas if you read a regular op-ed about Israel or the family or medicine, you're not starting with the assumption that you're supposed to laugh.

I can't not put humor in a book.

I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

people never write calmly but when they write indifferently.

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

When you're writing on someone else's show, you don't have to think as hard about nailing the perfect tone because you're kind of just like, 'Here's 20 ideas I thought of, and they can just pick the closest.'

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

One thing you really have to watch as a writer is getting on a soapbox or pulpit about anything. You don't want to alienate readers.

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

The true character of epistolary style is playfulness and urbanity.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

We like the John Gruber model - he writes some long stuff that's very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.