Top 100 Quotes About Prose
#1. What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.
Peter Brodie
#2. I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
Ben Brantley
#3. A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.
Anonymous
#4. I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.
Lauren Mayberry
#5. People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse and prose, and people have always delighted in it.
Voltaire
#6. Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.
Simon Armitage
#7. I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
Anthony Marra
#8. Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action.
Denise Mina
#9. 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
#10. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.
Richard Mitchell
#11. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#12. Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.
Fay Weldon
#13. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Steven Pinker
#14. When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
Sigmund Freud
#15. McCarthy's prose in 'Blood Meridian' comes blazing from the Book of Revelation.
Clive Sinclair
#16. Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
Marshall McLuhan
#17. That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
Robert Creeley
#18. I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.
Steven Pinker
#19. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
#20. 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
#21. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.
George Saintsbury
#22. I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.
Blaise Cendrars
#23. Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.
Roger Rosenblatt
#24. I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
Marguerite Young
#25. 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
#26. I am not a great prose stylist. I'm a storyteller. There are thousands of people who don't like what I do. Fortunately, there are millions who do.
James Patterson
#27. I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#28. I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show.
George Mastras
#29. 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,
#30. Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
F. Sionil Jose
#31. Here love begins to render the prose of Life into hymns and canticles of praise
Kahlil Gibran
#32. Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose.
A.J. Flowers
#33. The raw beauty of Natalia Ginzburg's prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.
Hilma Wolitzer
#34. As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
Samuel R. Delany
#35. So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph
Mahmoud Darwish
#36. We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.
Ernst Haas
#37. American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.
Eugene H. Peterson
#38. Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
Richard Mitchell
#39. Heather A. Slomski's stories are downright addictive. I kept promising myself to turn off the light after just one more, and then breaking that promise, beguiled by her cool, measured prose and by the surprises, tensions, and uncanny encounters simmering beneath its elegant surface.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
#40. I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
Gerald Durrell
#41. Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse ... I never pin up my hair with prose."
William Congreve
#42. I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
Ruth Rendell
#44. I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," ... do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.
Susan B. Anthony
#45. A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
John Lahr
#46. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.
Melissa Febos
#47. The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
Ron Chernow
#48. And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
Virginia Woolf
#49. Growing up in Malaysia and England, there wasn't an obvious route into the comics world, so my creative energy went into theatre and prose and then movies and TV.
Arvind Ethan David
#50. A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Eyvind Johnson
#52. For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
Ellen Key
#53. 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
#54. When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.
Matthea Harvey
#55. I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
Kevin Powers
#56. Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.
Jack Kerouac
#57. I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.
Christopher Hitchens
#58. Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
Jeremy Bentham
#59. I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
Ben Okri
#60. Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [ ... ] of all rhythms. But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse.
Stephane Mallarme
#61. Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
#62. Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.
James Kenneth Stephen
#63. Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#64. I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music.
Michael Gira
#65. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
Martin Amis
#66. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.
Ben Lerner
#67. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf
#68. How deep is the magic of sound may be learned by breaking some sweet verses into prose. The operation has been compared to gathering dew-drops, which shine like jewels upon the flower, but run into water in the hand. The elements remain, but the sparkle is gone.
Robert Aris Willmott
#69. Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
Victor Hugo
#70. Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Story Musgrave
#71. [Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.
Jeffrey Rosen
#72. For the prose artist the world is full of other people's words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#73. To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#74. So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
#75. Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#76. To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write.
Philip Kitcher
#78. My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law.
Robert Schumann
#79. Prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm.
Molly Peacock
#80. No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you ... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment.
Ronald Harwood
#81. Poetry is a niche genre, sure, but it has a way of opening people up. It opens me up. As with music and art, poetry is an essential human art and discussing its genesis, fruition and prose with somebody legitimately interested is intensely rewarding.
Nicholas Trandahl
#82. Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#83. Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth
that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves
that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night
so the rope, paper, knife.
Tadeusz Borowski
#84. But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn't make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.
Mark Forsyth
#85. 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
#86. Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writing formal prose, try and write 'try to.
William Strunk Jr.
#87. 'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.
Chuck Palahniuk
#88. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T. S. Eliot
#89. It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.
Ellen Glasgow
#90. The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
#91. Television is much more collaborative in many ways than prose.
Ann Cleeves
#92. From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that.
Jay Woodman
#93. Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
Joyce Carol Oates
#94. Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.
Sam Hamill
#95. See how weak prose is ... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.
Jack Spicer
#97. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Jorge Luis Borges
#98. A book that bores me to tears is a book that neglects character building and quality of prose.
Kristin Cashore
#99. 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
#100. From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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