Prose Quotes

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

An appreciation of prose is learned, not instinctive. It is an acquired taste, like Scotch whisky.

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

A lot of shows are more script-driven, like a prose script. As an actor, you never see a storyboard.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Hugely enjoyable and insightfulGosling has produced the perfect combination of rigorous research and lightness of prose to create a book that will transform every reader into a super snooper.

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.

The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.

Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!