A Quote by Oscar Wilde

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Oscar Wilde

Quote Topics

Chaos Everything Except Flashes His Language Lightning Mastered Style Writer

Quote Author

Oscar Wilde
Irish - Poet
October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900

Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.

William Benton Clulow

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Raymond Carver

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Richard Chenevix Trench

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

Noam Chomsky

When a new writer defends his "style," the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn't an artifice. Real style - voice - arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer's character. When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation - an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example.

Bill Roorbach

Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voice that is singular, and that's what I think writers should strive for, to have a style and a voice that is only theirs.

Jill Talbot

Chaos is impatient. It's random. And above all it's selfish. It tears down everything just for the sake of change, feeding on itself in constant hunger. But Chaos can also be appealing. It tempts you to believe that nothing matters except what you want.

Rick Riordan

From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the Left of 'creating chaos:' chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos among our allies.

Monica Crowley

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

Zane Grey

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

Simon McBurney

Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

Kurt Vonnegut

Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong.

Dan Morgenstern

I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eye. That night i lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person