Quotes about style
page 5

Francisco Varela photo

“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“The new self-styled social justice intellectuals and parties do not want an India without castes, they want castes without dharma.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Ram Swarup: “Logic behind Perversion of Caste”, Indian Express, 13-9-1996.

Basshunter photo
Robert Silverberg photo
Todd Snider photo
Dylan Moran photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Karel Appel photo

“The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

quote, 1984 - from ATV', 188; p. 49
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Viswanathan Anand photo

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.”

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 5

Bouck White photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“For beauty is enhanced by clothes of style.”

Che talor cresce una beltà un bel manto.
Canto XXVIII, stanza 12 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Charlotte Brontë photo
Bjarne Stroustrup photo
Eliezer Yudkowsky photo
José Mourinho photo
Miles Davis photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
Thornton Wilder photo
Peter Rhee photo

“It’s a perfect killing machine…A handgun [wound] is simply a stabbing with a bullet. It goes in like a nail…[With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15 style rifle] it's as if you shot somebody with a Coke can.”

Peter Rhee (1961) American surgeon

[February 22, 2018, All-American Killer: How the AR-15 Became Mass Shooters’ Weapon of Choice, w:Tim Dickinson, Tim, Dickinson, Rolling Stone, September 4, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/all-american-killer-how-the-ar-15-became-mass-shooters-weapon-of-choice-107819/]

Nigel Lythgoe photo
George Gershwin photo

“Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.”

George Gershwin (1898–1937) American composer and pianist

"The Relation of Jazz to American Music", in Henry Cowell (ed.) American Composers on American Music (1933); reprinted in Gregory R. Suriano (ed.) Gershwin in His Time (New York: Gramercy, 1998) p. 97.

Sanjaya Malakar photo

“I learned the hula, so now I know how to shake my booty Hawaiian style.”

Sanjaya Malakar (1989) American reality television personality

Asked what most people would be surprised to know about him on American Idol.

Rubén Darío photo

“I seek a form that my style cannot discover,
a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.”

Rubén Darío (1867–1916) Nicaraguan poet and writer

Prosas Profanas y Otros Poemas (Profane Hymns and Other Poems). I Seek a Form (1896).

Dana Milbank photo
Ernst Gombrich photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo
Camille Pissarro photo
Pete Doherty photo
Erik Naggum photo

“Shed the idea that you were programming in an OO style. There is no such thing. You were only programming a particular object system. Now you get to program a different object system.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: How much use of CLOS? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/60f4c36a707db3fe (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Theodor Mommsen photo

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Hosea Ballou photo

“A chaste and lucid style is indicative of the same personal traits in the author.”

Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) American Universalist minister (1771–1852)

Manuscript, Sermons; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 758.

Joseph Joubert photo
Roger Ebert photo

“Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie is a good one and there are talented people in the cast, what we have here is a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raising-arizona-1987 of Raising Arizona (20 March 1987)
Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Herbert Marcuse photo
Camille Paglia photo
Chaim Soutine photo
Tsunetomo Yamamoto photo

“The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397

Joseph Joubert photo
Phillip Abbott Luce photo
Ani DiFranco photo

“Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

V. S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980) [Random House, ISBN 0-394-74683-X], "Edmund Wilson: Towards Revolution," p. 141
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Matthew Arnold photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“I feel better now than I did at any time last season; the shoulder really hurt me bad last year. The left shoulder still gives me some trouble. It makes me swing differently. I have to adjust. Sometimes I find I'm over-cutting the ball. That is not my natural style. I used to swing and I just knew I could hit the ball hard. I knew when I could hit to right field, when I could pull. Now it's different. I have to force myself more than I ever did. Maybe it's because I'm getting old. Maybe.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Discussing two separate pre-season shoulder injuries, sustained, respectively, in February 1968 to the right shoulder, and in March 1969 to the left; as quoted in "A Sounder Clemente Has New Outlook; Buc Super Star May Play On and On" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=JFAOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4H0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7168,1534716 by Charley Feeney, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, August 12, 1969), p. 18
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1969</big>

Jorge Rafael Videla photo

“We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.”

Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013) Argentinian President

As quoted in Christopher Hitchens (2010), Hitch-22: A Memoir, (Atlantic Books).

Marianne von Werefkin photo
Ernest Bramah photo
Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Thornton Wilder photo

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

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

"Alex Katz" (1986)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Part I. Introduction. 3. The Origins of the Style
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

“.. no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,... it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

The School of New York, exhibition catalogue, Perls Gallery, 1951; as quoted in the New York School – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row Publishers, 1978, p. 46
1950s

Dan Bern photo

“Are you gonna follow your soul? Or just the style of the day?”

Dan Bern (1965) American musician

Soul
(2003)

Susan Cain photo

“We have a two-tier class system when it comes to personality style. To devalue introversion is a waste of talent, energy and happiness.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

Bielski, Zosia (interviewer), "Giving introverts permission to be themselves," The Globe and Mail, January 26, 2012.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Fred Astaire photo

“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”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Sometimes misattributed to Astaire. In fact, it's just a scripted line (written by Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart) from The Notorious Landlady. Astaire delivers the line to Jack Lemmon.
Misattributed

“In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 162
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

John Lydgate photo
David Crystal photo
Helen Hayes photo
Yevgeny Yevtushenko photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Dianne Feinstein photo
C. Wright Mills photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" On the Study of Celtic Literature http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/scl/index.htm" (1867), Pt. 6

Walter Warlimont photo
George Long photo
Sydney Smith photo

“In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 11 http://books.google.com/books?id=R18JAAAAQAAJ&q=%22In+composing+as+a+general+rule+run+your+pen+through+every+other+word+you+have+written+you+have+no+idea+what+vigour+it+will+give+your+style%22&pg=PA382#v=onepage
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Mike Tyson photo
Greg Egan photo
Martin Heidegger photo
José Raúl Capablanca photo
Edmund Landau photo
Indro Montanelli photo

“[Addressed to Berlusconi who wanted to impose himself on the editorial style of "Il Giornale"] In the art of entrepeneurship, you are certainly a genius, and I an asshole. But in the art of argument the genius is me, and you the asshole.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

cited in Marco Travaglio, Montanelli e il Cavaliere: storia di un grande e di un piccolo uomo.
2000s - 2010s

David Mumford photo
John Fante photo
Helen Hayes photo
M. Balamuralikrishna photo

“Style. It varies from person to person. Without it music will be monotonous.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Chitra Swaminathan "He defines ‘style’ as tradition".

Edward Young photo

“A Christian is the highest style of man.”

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 788.