Top 100 Quotes About Prose
#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. Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
#58. I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
Francine Prose
#59. Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.
Julie Burchill
#60. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
Michael Longley
#61. Bad bananas are like push-up bras
a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush, and we're not supposed to complain.
Kate Lebo
#62. A lot of shows are more script-driven, like a prose script. As an actor, you never see a storyboard.
Tom Kenny
#63. The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.
Conrad Williams
#64. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#65. 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
#66. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#67. Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry,
Walt Whitman
#68. The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy.
Michelle Franklin
#69. Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine
Tanith Lee
#70. A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.
Jean Burden
#71. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#72. Ode to the Chamber
... linger here amidst the chamber
in which we embrace our love
talk to me of sonnets
and call me turtledove ...
Muse
#73. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.
Akash Lakhotia
#74. 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
#75. The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.
Pattiann Rogers
#76. Of course, I've always read. I started when I was four years old and just didn't stop. I read all the time.
Francine Prose
#77. Money has the power to get, all that you want.
Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want.
Akash Lakhotia
#78. Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.
Dave Morris
#79. I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.
Marie Brennan
#81. 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
#82. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
Nadeem Aslam
#83. I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Virginia Woolf
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!
Piers Anthony
#88. Something about the beauty of the library and how many books there were made me feel really eager to read, and I couldn't wait to get some free time so I could go back there and explore.
Francine Prose
#89. 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
#90. Good writing should be grasped at once - in a second.
Francine Prose
#92. 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
#93. I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.
Chang-rae Lee
#94. Most important thing in life is family,
Without them you are nothing.
Whatever you do will be worth nothing,
If there is no one to appreciate it.
Akash Lakhotia
#96. I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
#97. Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.
Sara Gruen
#98. I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.
Matthea Harvey
#99. 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
#100. The man on the ceiling casts shadows of flesh, and sometimes the shadows take on lives of their own.
Melanie Tem
