Top 24 English Prose Quotes
#1. Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.
F.L. Lucas
#2. Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
Robert Graves
#3. George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.
Ilka Chase
#4. Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.
T. S. Eliot
#5. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
Victor Hugo
#6. I have observed that as long as one lives and bestirs himself, he can always find food and raiment, though it may not be of the choicest description.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#8. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
George Orwell
#10. For my stand-up, I always have my notebook with me and if something strikes me, I'll write it down.
Janeane Garofalo
#11. The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
George Orwell
#12. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class
Francine Prose
#13. I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
Martin Amis
#14. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
Elmore Leonard
#15. I once had a leather jacket that got ruined in the rain. Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of the time? When it's raining, do cows go up to the farmhouse, "Let us in! We're all wearing leather! Open the door! We're going to ruin the whole outfit here!"
Jerry Seinfeld
#16. I studied theater in college, and I absolutely knew that I loved acting, and I knew that I loved theater.
Hill Harper
#17. 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.
Will Schwalbe
#18. A lot of time, I'd spell things in standard English instead of phonetically because I want people to understand what's going on. It's also very lyrical, and the great thing about lyrical prose is even when you're not totally sure of the words, you can be swayed by the musicality of it.
Marlon James
#19. Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
#20. I'm telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you're owning it. And I don't know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.
Tami Hoag
#21. I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.
Jean Rhys
#22. 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.
Edmund White
#23. I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
Lynn Abbey
#24. 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
