Top 51 Good Prose Quotes
#1. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
Michael Longley
#2. Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
#4. Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
#5. Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one.
Steven Pinker
#6. The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen ... In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?
Allen Ginsberg
#7. It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.
W. Somerset Maugham
#9. 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
#10. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Steven Pinker
#11. Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#13. The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
Rick Moody
#14. 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
#16. Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose.
Laurie Alberts
#17. The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#18. 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
Robert Musil
#19. How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?
John Tillotson
#20. 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
#21. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
#22. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
Richard Mitchell
#24. 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
#25. Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
Erica Jong
#26. Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet?
Francine Prose
#27. I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.
Francine Prose
#28. In painting as in prose, a good eye is not enough to tell you whether what you see is real or fake.
David Bellos
#29. An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
Barbara Tuchman
#30. If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
Hilary Mantel
#31. 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
#32. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
Francine Prose
#33. Jesus
if Kilgore Trout could only write! Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
James Payn
#35. Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.
Moliere
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
#39. Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
Gore Vidal
#40. Good writing should be grasped at once - in a second.
Francine Prose
#41. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#42. 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
#43. When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.
Rick Moody
#44. Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
#45. Dave was a confirmed serotonin junkie. Any day of the year, he chose a good book, a hot cupper, and air-conditioning over jeopardy to life and limb.
Dan Sofer
#46. I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.
Ted Rall
#47. I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.
Chris Wooding
#48. Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious,
Francine Prose
#49. Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes.
Cole Porter
#50. Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.
Barbara Minto
#51. I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!
Megan Amram
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