Prose Quotes
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
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.
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.
Mother Dolores Hart's prose is a reflection of the inner beauty she has always possessed. A fascinating read... and read again!
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
Poetry is a language for when you can't quite write prose about something, you can't quite say it, but if you do a poem, it kind of gets to the point.
I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.
My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.
The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.
Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.
"I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else"
I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.
I wanted to be a writer. I still want to be a prose writer. I feel I am more temperamentally suited to that kind of life, although there are things I still want to do with music.
A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
Prose pretends to be straightforward in its application to the truth, but truth itself is a dissembler. Poetry, much more honest, knows the deception can't be overcome.
Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose.
I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.
The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.
I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift -- a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.
one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.
Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."
... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.
I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.
Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.
