Style Quotes

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

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

Dame Edith Sitwell

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Pablo Picasso

Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Pablo Picasso

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

Victor Hugo

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

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Charles Baudelaire

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Samuel Butler

Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.

Jean de la Bruyere

We can see the Divine in each speck of dust, but that doesn't stop us from wiping it away with a wet sponge. The Divine doesn't disappear; it's transformed into the clean surface.

Paulo Coelho

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

Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.

Marshall McLuhan

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

William Hazlitt

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

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Oscar Wilde

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

Michael Lipsey

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

Andre Malraux

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Stephen King