Prose Quotes

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

Beer is prose. Wine is poetry.

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

Nobody has time for your priceless prose. Get to the point.

When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.

I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Gritty and witty, The Chicago Way is done the classic Raymond Chandler Way. Harvey's taut plot, snappy prose, and memorable characters make this debut novel a real winner.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn't as interesting as I'd like it to be.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

A book that bores me to tears is a book that neglects character building and quality of prose.

The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is telling.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.

A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

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

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .

When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

My heavens! I've been talking prose for the last forty years without knowing it.

Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window.

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.