Quotes About Short Prose

#1. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal

Edgar Allan Poe

#2. A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ...

Edgar Allan Poe

#3. It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.

Michio Kaku

#4. Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

Haruki Murakami

#5. Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Mary Karr

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

Ryan Goodrich

#7. Man's Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,that tho' she guide his highest flight heav'nward, and teach himdignity morals manners and human comfort,she can delicatly and dangerously bedizenthe rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.

Robert Bridges

#8. The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything ... he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood Early Stories And Other Writings

#9. I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

Greg Rucka

#10. 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

#11. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Kellie Elmore

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.

Ambrose Bierce

#15. I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

PJ Harvey

#16. I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!

Megan Amram

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

Herbert Gold

#20. 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

#21. Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.

Gabrielle Zevin

#22. I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Susan Hill

#23. Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

Tea Obreht

#24. 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

#25. I remember one day my son, our Robert, was looking at me on the settee and looking at me on the television, and then all of a sudden he said: 'Why don't you bring that pretty mummy home with you?' And I thought: 'Oh dear, I'm going to have to dress up at home now as well!'

Cilla Black

#26. 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

#27. I think I've been wishing for celebrity for so long that I've got used to being someone who's petitioning the establishment for acceptance ... my whole schtick, my whole identity, is so wrapped up in being a petitioner that I don't really know how to react now that petition has been granted.

Toby Young

#28. The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

Agnes Varda