Prose Quotes - Page 10

• I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

  Sarah Manguso

  Book, Writing, Trying

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• I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.

  Alex Lemon

  Writing, Challenges

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• For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

  David Biespiel

  Writing, Long, Writing Poetry

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw," which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world.

  Chris Ware

  Distance, Writing, Trying

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

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• I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.

  Ron Padgett

  Writing, Different

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I've been working on a collection of prose vignettes about girls I've had crushes on, from the age of six to the age of eighteen. This manuscript is thematic and organized in a way my poems about my friends aren't. My friends get into the poems simply because they mean a lot to me.

  Ron Padgett

  Crush, Girl, Mean

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.

  Shane McCrae

  Memories, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

  Shane McCrae

  Real, Book, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The very term "turning pages" suggests nonstop action. But I am all about character and beautiful writing. I eat that up like popcorn. Whether a book is action-packed or not, all I need are well-written prose and quirky, fabulous characters to keep me going.

  Elizabeth Wein

  Beautiful, Book, Writing

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.

  Sara Paretsky

  Action

  Interview With Karin Slaughter, www.amazonbookreview.com. April 12, 2017.

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• I wanted to be a writer. I still want to be a prose writer. I feel I am more temperamentally suited to that kind of life, although there are things I still want to do with music.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Kind

  Source: chicago.gopride.com

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• My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing

  Source: thefloatinglibrary.com

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• I'm kind of a creature of the alt-weekly universe - my real education into higher culture was acquired in coffee shops, reading those papers, digging into that lively mishmash of opinion for drift, a sense of what to see, what to hear, what to read, etc. - and I'd like to think that scene's still vital, although I understand there's been a fair amount of conglomerating, which would seem to undercut its radical roots, its funky local flavor. I'd encourage any writer with an eye for life and an ear for prose to give it a try. You can work out your chops just fine in newsprint.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Real, Coffee, Reading

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

  Joyce Johnson

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've always believed that poetry must speak of realities as least as complicated as those spoken of in prose. I've read books of poems, even single poems, which are, for me, at least the equivalent of a short story or a novel. Martin Amis, in an interview with Saul Bellow in the early eighties, quotes Bellow asking, "Why not address 'the mysterious circumstance of being', say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet?" This has been and still is my ambition.

  Lawrence Joseph

  Book, Ambition, Reality

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I think when you're writing prose there's a lot of attendant description and that's were I used to really go bananas. With a screenplay that all gets filled in by the director, so it just sort of pulls you back by virtue of the form. You also have to use more economy as a screenwriter and so it's kind of limiting in a good way.

  Diablo Cody

  Writing, Thinking, Kind

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

  Tom Odell

  Song, Writing, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

  Jonathan Ames

  Writing, Giving, Goal

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Cartooning is completely different from other media: it is closely related to film and prose, other narrative forms, but the skills needed to realize a story are very different, and include not only drawing and writing dialogue and narration, but graphic design and the ability to depict time passing visually. It's a whole suite of skills that has to go into making a comics page, skills that are quite distinct from those that go into writing a page of prose, or making a film.

  Jessica Abel

  Writing, Design, Different

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• The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose.

  Alex Lemon

  Creative, Poetic, Sensibility

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• This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue-people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

  Janet Fitch

  Dark, Voice, People

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• I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

  Matthea Harvey

  Narrative, Impulse

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Two, Different

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

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• The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Crazy, Ocean, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

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