Purple Prose Quotes

#1. Purple prose attracts attention more than converts.

Jeffrey Toobin

#2. When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

Cyril Connolly

#3. His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.

Stella Gibbons

#4. For once, I knew how it felt to have a father.

Trish Kaye Lleone

#5. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I ... I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?

Angela Carter

#6. Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#7. You are in love with my husband. You need some acting lessons to learn to hide it better.

Mary Papas

#8. Yuvali struggled to put one foot in front of the other. The long leaves of a purple-flowered bush raked her forehead. The flower emerged from bulbous green tubes, unfolding toward the sun. The petals radiated like flecks in an eye, a whirlpool, a sea-shell." Ch.19

B.T. Lowry

#9. Tore up from the floor up. Followed by a big outtie.
John Mathew

J.R. Ward

#10. I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

H. G. Bissinger

#11. So many large words, as though syllables will hide the truth.

Sharon Mock

#12. If she were a broken girl whose life was a wreck and would never be the same, their vigor for her story would simply be unacceptable. They couldn't allow themselves to be so attracted to her narrative if it ended any way but beautifully.

Charlie Donlea

#13. The face ... always the face. The body can [have] muscles or [be] too skinny
I don't care.

Louise Bourgoin

#14. So many large words, as though the syllables will hide the truth.

Sharon Mock

#15. Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.

Ellen Datlow

#16. A quarter-moon smeared a feverish glow on the marble slabs and dappled the trodden weeds that beleaguered them with a pale dewy leprosy; only the massy shadows which clustered around the trunks of the ancient oaks and beeches escaped its infection.

William Scott Home

#17. [...] 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