"Style is the entire writer. You can be said to have a style when a reader, after reading several lines or part of a page, can recognize who the writer is. Flaubert sought to remove himself from his book entirely, to have it exist without him, as if his attitudes were not a part of it, his sense of irony, his taste. But he can't be removed from the book-there is something else. I feel a resistance to the word "style" because it can also suggest something inessential like “ornament" or “fashion."
I sometimes prefer the word "voice" instead. They are not exactly the same thing. Style is a preference; a voice is almost genetic, absolutely distinctive. No other writer sounds like Isak Dinesen. No one sounds like Raymond Carver or Faulkner. They rewrite endlessly: Babel, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. To be a writer is to be sentenced to correcting. It wasn't what they intended to write. Or it was but the intention was misguided, or it could be better; it was too long, it was flat; it missed the true point, it didn't look right. But it always sounds like them. It's their style. It's in their voice."
— The Art of Fiction, James Salter