A Quote by Constance Hale
Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.
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I have confidence and je ne sais quoi. That is unmistakable.
A pair of Berluti shoes has this flair, these nuances in colour and patina, so I thought: 'What if we took this je ne sais quoi and turn it into a menswear brand?'
He squeezed Steve's shoulder possessively. "Oh, Zero. He is not you, I must admit. He does not have your bravery, your nobility, your je ne sais quoi, and all he talks about is this magical place called 'Canada'.
It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
There's a certain je ne sais quoi that Americans have in spades - a we-can-do-anything spirit that makes so many things possible for all of us. We're rugged individualists, aspirational in nature, and we like to think for ourselves.
I listen to the timbre of the music, and I fit my voice to blend with that timbre.
For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.
All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.
It's an interesting and demanding art to do voices. I have been told so many times that I have a distinctive voice, but of course, I don't hear my own voice as others do, so I don't know.
The thing that separates Sophie from the music I do for other people is that it's 100% written by me. In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have.
There is really a je ne sais quoi about turkey cooking - the air of festivity, the family squabbles, the constant basting - that does not apply to the turkey breast, which is, really, a convenience of food... A turkey without seasonal angst is like a baseball game without a national anthem, a winter without snow, a birthday party without candles.
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.
I can't listen to my own voice. I change my voicemail on my machine literally every week because I'm so obsessed with getting the right tone of voice.
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
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