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Descriptive Quotes

Writers on what it takes to make a scene visible.

Writers here get specific about their own descriptive habits, from one admitting her prose leans heavy on emotion and sensory detail to another naming 'Lolita' as the book whose wordplay and description still haunt their own work.

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

Sylvia Plath

I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining. One, I rarely have anything to say. It's much more interesting for me to discover some meaning that you didn't know that you could create.

Quotes by Samuel Ervin Beam

The exploration of space: Be it by humans or robots, based on the best choice for the mission and the most efficient means to return the data and science sought. Most of the time, this will mean we send robots...

Quotes by Rick Tumlinson

One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very...

Quotes by Richard Harmon

Action Quotes

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds...

Quotes by Peter Singer

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the...

Quotes by Martha Nussbaum

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his...

Quotes by Marisha Pessl

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

Quotes by Louise Brooks

Always Quotes

There are areas of philosophy that are important, but I think of them as being subsumed by other fields. In the case of descriptive philosophy, you have literature or logic, which, in my view, is really mathematics.

Quotes by Lawrence M. Krauss

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

Quotes by Gavin Bryars

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less...

Quotes by Ernst Haas

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

Quotes by Edmund Husserl

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

Quotes by Douglas Wood

Fat Quotes

Music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But people can do much more with music than that. It can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, all walks of life.

Quotes by Charlie Parker

I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.

Quotes by Camryn Manheim

So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.

Quotes by Camryn Manheim

Frequently Asked Questions

What do these Descriptive quotes focus on?
They're mostly writers reflecting on their own descriptive style, from prose weighted heavily toward emotion and the senses to a direct nod at Nabokov's wordplay in 'Lolita.'
Why do people search for descriptive quotes?
Writers looking for craft advice or inspiration often want to hear how other authors describe their own approach to vivid, sensory writing.
Is there a quote about a specific book's descriptive style?
Yes, one writer names 'Lolita' as the book that haunts them, citing Nabokov's love of wordplay and artfully controlled descriptive detail as the reason.
Does any quote distinguish types of descriptive writing?
One does, noting that some poems lean more lyric and others more descriptive or narrative, with each poem fixed in its own single moment.
What other pages relate to Descriptive quotes?
Browse Great quotes for more on strong writing, or Action quotes for a different narrative style.

A poet distinguishes lyric from narrative description, noting how each poem fixes one moment in time. Browse Great or Action quotes for more on the craft of writing.