Top 80 Best Prose Quotes
#1. The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.
Richard Armour
#2. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#3. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#4. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Paul Theroux
#5. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#6. The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch.
Joe R. Lansdale
#7. Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
Rudyard Kipling
#8. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#9. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
#10. All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.
Moliere
#11. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.
Stanley Fish
#12. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#14. The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
#15. If everyone could be brought low, then everyone could rise up.
Nicki Salcedo
#16. 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.
Kevin Powers
#17. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#18. I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.
John Legend
#19. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#21. All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
#22. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#23. What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel
Francine Prose
#24. The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world
it is like operetta in prose
all so flowery and heavenlike.
Marsden Hartley
#25. In the world of Big Macks Starbucks coffee and oversized SUVS it was business as usual snort and go
Saira Viola
#26. 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.
Matthea Harvey
#27. People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.
Francine Prose
#28. 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
#29. In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Richard M. Nixon
#30. [...] Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]
Charles Stross
#31. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
#32. i am changing
and i am loving change.
AVA.
#33. Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone.
Madeline Miller
#34. 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.
John Ciardi
#35. everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay.
AVA.
#36. no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.
love yourself first,
and you will always be in love.
AVA.
#37. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
Basil Bunting
#38. The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
#39. 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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#40. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.
T. S. Eliot
#41. Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.
Francine Prose
#42. Change for someone today and tomorrow you will hear them say, "You are not the same.
Akash Lakhotia
#43. Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H.L. Mencken
#44. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#45. There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.
Daniel J. Rice
#46. Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
#47. At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.
Teju Cole
#48. Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.
Jean Rhys
#49. And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned.
Ali Smith
#50. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#51. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.
AVA.
#52. show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin.
AVA.
#53. It doesn't matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again.
Once you've started to leave, you will run your whole life.
Charlotte Eriksson
#54. 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.
Lord Byron
#56. I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
#57. 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
#58. Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
Harold Bloom
#59. I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).
Ian McEwan
#60. 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.
Boris Pasternak
#61. The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes.
Vera Brittain
#62. I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?
Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows.
Meraaqi
#63. Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf
#64. Habit is the best thing for you if you're trying to write prose.
Alan Cheuse
#65. If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.
Anna Brackett
#66. On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.
V.S. Naipaul
#67. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
#68. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
#69. All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.
James Agate
#70. There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven't seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time.
Francine Prose
#71. What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
Philip Pullman
#72. A novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it,
Neil Gaiman
#73. You're trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it's that compression. The best code is poetry.
Satya Nadella
#74. I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#75. This is Lovecraft's best terrible story. It is so artificial...and so overblown...and so ludicrous...that it slithers-through tiramisu-rich prose that might as well be heavy metal lyrics ("a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning")-all the way to the summit of high camp.
Kenneth Hite
#76. I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.
Bob Shacochis
#77. I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath
Charles D'Ambrosio
#78. Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best... life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.
Bailey Vincent
#79. In the story of life, the prologue and epilogue are written by God. Yet the plot has been given to us; therefore we should write the best prose we can.
James D. Maxon
#80. When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend's sisters,
I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.
Charlotte Eriksson