Style

I don’t think it works to cultivate strangeness. The best you can do is not squash it if it starts to appear. Einstein didn’t try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange.

At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo.

The only style worth having is the one you can’t help. And this is especially true for strangeness. There is no shortcut to it. The Northwest Passage that the Mannerists, the Romantics, and two generations of American high school students have searched for does not seem to exist. The only way to get there is to go through good and come out the other side.

Paul Graham, Taste for Makers, February, 2002

Buy the gold-plate faucets if you will, but do not accessorize your prose.

William Strunk and E. B. White, The elements of style, Boston, 1999

[Kant] said that he had to read Rousseau’s books several times, because, at a first reading, the beauty of the style prevented him from noticing the matter.

Bertrand Russell, A history of western philosophy: and its connection with political and social circumstances from the earliest times to the present day, London, 1946, p. 731

The writing of good English is […] a moral matter, as the Romans held that the writing of good Latin was.

Alan Hodge, The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, London, 1943, p. 39