Prose Quotes

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

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!

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

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

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!

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

That prose is a verse, and verse is a prose; convincing all, by demonstrating plain – poetic souls delight in prose insane

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

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world -- it is like operetta in prose -- all so flowery and heavenlike.

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.