Quotes about style

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

— Renata Adler

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

— Martin Amis

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

— Raymond Chandler

A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.

— Coco Chanel

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.

— Edna W. Chase

Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.

— Lord Chesterfield

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

— Jean Cocteau

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

— Jean Cocteau

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

— Cyril Connolly

Style is the image of character.

— Edward Gibbon

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body -- both go together, they can't be separated.

— Jean-Luc Godard

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.

— Ernest Hemingway

Tis beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just IT. Some women will stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.

— Rudyard Kipling

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

— Paul Klee

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

— Willem De Kooning

Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.

— Andre Malraux

Style [Is] the hallmark of a temperament stamped on the material in hand.

— Andre Maurois

Happy the society whose deepest divisions are ones of style.

— Peter Mckay

To give style to one's character -- a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

— Margaret Oliphant

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

— Blaise Pascal

A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

— Katherine Anne Porter

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clich?, not from real life.

— Ezra Pound

Fashions fade, but style is eternal.

— Yves Saint-Laurent

Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

I do not much dislike the matter, but the manner of his speech.

— William Shakespeare

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

— Susan Sontag

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

— Wallace Stevens

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

— Jonathan Swift

Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.

— Gore Vidal

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

— Walt Whitman

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.

— Oscar Wilde

You can't drop a tattoo off at the thrift shop when it goes out of style.

— Michael Lipsey