Top 100 Prose Writing Quotes
#1. There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
#2. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
Truman Capote
#3. I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing.
David Rees
#4. 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.
Judy Collins
#5. I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.
Jerzy Kosinski
#6. In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
G. Willow Wilson
#7. I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#8. There were aspects of stardom I didn't like, which were of no consequence, really, but the positive things far outweighed the negative. By the time I came to write 'Setting Sons,' I felt my writing was more like prose, set to music.
Paul Weller
#9. That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.
Adam Christopher
#10. To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#11. 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
#12. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
#13. The tragedy of love is in its ending,
the blessing - everything else.
No love ever deserves to end.
Akif Kichloo
#14. Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#15. 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
#16. I personally am a 'discovery writer,' as we're termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then revising the entire thing. When it comes to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces into a book.
Katharine Kerr
#17. Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
#18. If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
David Nicholls
#19. What would his friends think? The Honorable Hatlee Beech, federal judge, writing prose like a faggot, extorting money out of innocent people.
John Grisham
#20. Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose.
Laurie Alberts
#21. At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'
Pete Hamill
#22. Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.
Stephen Jones
#23. Helen Lowe writes wonderful stories, yes, but her work also speaks with lyricism to deeper questions of how we treat each other. With lovely prose that brings vivid life to her characters, she creates a universe with people we care about. This is an author with a gift for fantasy.
Catherine Asaro
#24. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
Paul Auster
#25. Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's prose.
Jonathan Lethem
#26. The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
Neil Simon
#27. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#28. With prose, I know where I'm starting and I think I know where I'm going.
Paul T. Scheuring
#29. Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!
Lori R. Lopez
#30. Poetry is a language for when you can't quite write prose about something, you can't quite say it, but if you do a poem, it kind of gets to the point.
Sakyong Mipham
#31. Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
Virginia Woolf
#32. I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.
Vijay Seshadri
#34. I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Charles De Lint
#35. What really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.
Stephen Koch
#37. 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
#38. Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It it a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.
Jonathan Barnes
#39. Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes.
Cole Porter
#40. 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
#41. I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.
Raymond Carver
#43. I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Jorge Luis Borges
#44. My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me.
Neal Cassady
#45. With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right. And consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and got to "Kill Bill" volume 1 and 2.
Quentin Tarantino
#46. My writing could be the most beautiful or important piece of prose, but it means nothing if it's boring, if people aren't listening or reading. I think transporting someone, putting them in a story for a few hours, taking them out of their worlds, is what I always strive to do.
Victoria Aveyard
#47. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Jonathan Lethem
#48. I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.
Winifred Holtby
#49. The more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
#50. Writing voice isn't as much a function of thinking as it is something that eludes definition and therefore assimilation. The more artful flavors of prose are more often a function of intuition and imitation fused with heart and wit and delivered with a strong does of lyric sensibility. It
Larry Brooks
#51. Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
#52. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
James Patterson
#53. The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.
Ann Zwinger
#54. There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Werner Herzog
#55. When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing - you have its skeleton.
Howard Mittelmark
#56. One reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#57. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
Per Brinch Hansen
#58. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#60. Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
Arthur Smith
#62. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
Shelby Foote
#63. Good writing should be grasped at once - in a second.
Francine Prose
#64. I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.
Charles McCarry
#65. Writing a play, you have to retain it all in your head - you need more time. With prose, you can snatch an hour here, an hour there.
Nell Leyshon
#67. 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
#68. The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.
Alina Stefanescu
#69. Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
#70. The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
#77. Her life had been too safe to need courage, and too easy to develop resolve.
Stephen T. Harper
#78. Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say ... but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
Alain De Botton
#79. The moon hung heavy over the lake like an overripe orange, trickling its golden stream of light across inky depths.
Julie Lessman
#80. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.
Alan Joshua
#81. 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.
Lionel Shriver
#82. Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
#83. 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
#85. A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
Paul McCartney
#86. He had great respect for a novelist like James. Pound knew about the concentration of energies required to write novels and also knew that he did not have such qualities, that his inspirations came more in flashes than in sustained work. Writing prose was difficult,
John Tytell
#87. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody
#88. Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.
Robert Frost
#89. Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.
Francine Prose
#90. Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It's the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing 'four years later', but you can shift time in a sentence or two.
Mark Boal
#91. [T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds.
Julie Lessman
#93. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
E. M. Forster
#94. I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
Bernard Malamud
#95. If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
Lori Lansens
#96. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.
Denise Duhamel
#97. As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.
Ann Zwinger
#98. Use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of a sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage.
Chuck Wendig
#99. I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
#100. 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
