Prose Quotes

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.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Details are the Life of 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 novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

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.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.

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.

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.

You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal

Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it.

Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.

I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.