Quotes About Prose Fiction

#1. I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

Ian McEwan

#2. Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Harold Bloom

#3. The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.

James Kelman

#4. I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

John C. Hawkes

#5. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.

Neil Gaiman

#6. In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

James Kelman

#7. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#8. The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

Nicholas Royle

#9. You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well.

Lynn Coady

#10. In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Ben Marcus

#11. 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

#12. Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson's first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.

Christine Schutt

#13. Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Bret Easton Ellis

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk,
when you could not even walk.

Akash Lakhotia

#17. I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.

Jim Crace

#18. Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius.

Ramsey Campbell

#19. Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

Sam Shepard

#20. I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Jesmyn Ward

#21. There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

Sam Lipsyte

#22. I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins.

William S. Burroughs

#23. Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window.

Mu Xin

#24. I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

Matthea Harvey

#25. My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Tom Bissell

#26. Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

Hilary Mantel

#27. A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.

Francine Prose

#28. If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?

Ryan Goodrich

#29. Sleeping Atlantis

Silent cool waters
dancing upon her skin ~
silent cool water
ushering dreams within...

Muse

#30. Don't look up to people, don't be someone's following.
Now a days everything you see is just a lie,
Instead be the person you want to follow.

Akash Lakhotia

#31. A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

Declan Kiberd

#32. 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

#33. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

Francine Prose

#34. 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

#35. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.

Akash Lakhotia

#36. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

Nadeem Aslam

#37. 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

#38. If someone likes my fiction more for the quality of my prose rather than the quality of my storytelling, I'm doing something wrong.

Jamie Ford

#39. Time in the most powerful thing.
Not money, not power, not hope.
A person can have everything they
desire but without time they are,
all useless.

Akash Lakhotia

#40. One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

Ng Yi-Sheng

#41. Poetry vs. Prose

One difference of course
is the length of the line.
And some people suppose
that prose doesn't rhyme.

But I have a theory
that's more like a question:
If prose is lengthy fiction
is poetry short suggestion?

Daniel Klawitter

#42. To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

Robert Caro

#43. More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

David Simon

#44. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

Diablo Cody

#45. The rhythm of fraught footsteps and fervent heartbeat orchestrated a symphony of anticipation and dread.

Brian A. McBride

#46. 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

#47. A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

Anthony Burgess

#48. Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

Francine Prose

#49. 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