Bad Prose Quotes

#1. 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.

Anthony Burgess

#2. Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

Winston Churchill

#3. Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.

Barbara Minto

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

Eugenio Montale

#5. It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.

Stewart O'Nan

#6. The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.

Steven Pinker

#7. This point I could not show myself, of course, or all would

Lee Smith

#8. Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.

Melissa Rosenberg

#9. most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable.

Marijn Haverbeke

#10. I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins.

William S. Burroughs

#11. He didn't like the way things were going.
There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

Stephen King

#12. To say the Israelis were caught off guard was like saying the Great Wall of China is long" is not just a random bad sentence, it's LaHaye and Jenkins's idea of Pulitzer-winning prose.

Daniel Radosh

#13. I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show.

George Mastras

#14. Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser today than he was yesterday - that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason, run
ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he, himself, has given no intimation?

Abraham Lincoln

#15. 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.

Janet Burroway

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

Wilson Follett

#17. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Jon Ronson

#18. Wherever she sought solitude, she was never alone. Suddenly that wasn't a bad thing. There was safety in numbers greater than one and sanity in knowing that everyone healed. If everyone has scars, there are two choices. Bleed to death slowly or stitch yourself together.

Nicki Salcedo

#19. Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them.

Patrick DeWitt

#20. I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can't. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#21. You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

Janet Fitch

#22. The skin around the assistant director's eyes stretches.

Anthony Doerr

#23. I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.

Eileen Myles

#24. I find myself getting associated with a lot of younger people in the game. I still enjoy playing with them, and I think they still enjoy playing with me. As long as I can stay competitive and have fun doing what I'm doing, I guess I'll keep doing it.

Arnold Palmer

#25. To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable - like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

Mark Twain

#26. The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

Tom Wolfe

#27. Bad bananas are like push-up bras
a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush, and we're not supposed to complain.

Kate Lebo

#28. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.

Mark Twain