A Quote by F. L. Lucas

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

F. L. Lucas

Quote Topics

Trust Apart Both Ears English Few Matters Me Much Principles Prose Readers Rhythm Rules Seem Should Simple Sound Writers

Quote Author

F. L. Lucas
English - Novelist
1894 - 1967

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

Ruskin Bond

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

Martin Amis

I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed. There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers. And it's appropriate, because the writer is getting paid and the reader isn't.

Jonathan Santlofer

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

Laura Lippman

I think a lot of writers are tempted to add complexity by over-complicating things, but always remember that most natural rules/laws are, at their core, simple. Start simple, and build from there, or you risk getting yourself and your readers tangled.

V. E. Schwab

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

Pattiann Rogers

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

Julian Barnes

I have very strict rules in my head that seem to me to be the way things should sound.

Ann Goldstein

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

Katie Kitamura

I just enjoy the sound as I hear it in everything around me. The high and low frequencies of sound bewitch me. Whether I am in a shop, in the bathroom or listening to noise that my fans make... everything is music to my ears and drives me. I just put all these things in rhythm when I'm playing.

Sivamani

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

Darin Strauss

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

Anne Stevenson

There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.

Peter Schjeldahl

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.