Prose Quotes - Page 18

• I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

  Rob Roberge

  Writing, Influence, Rhythm

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Ideas, Encounters, Fiction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Growing Up, Creative, Theatre

  "Nailed It!: David and Kyriazis on 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'". Interview with Keith Silva, comicsbulletin.com. March 8, 2016.

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• With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."

  Quentin Tarantino

  Writing, Kill Bill, Calling

  "Pulp And Circumstance: Tarantino Rewrites History". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. August 27, 2009.

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• By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Writing, Feet, People

  "Quentin Tarantino: 'Inglourious' Child Of Cinema". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 28, 2009.

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• When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, People

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• [Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Writing, Voice, Louis Brandeis

  Source: www.slate.com

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Pants

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

  Matthea Harvey

  People, Want, Natural

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more.

  James Kenneth Stephen

  Boys, World, Eccentric

  James Kenneth Stephen, “To R. K.”

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• I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Writing, Wish, Want Him

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• 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

  Art, Differences, Fiction

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

  Yuriy Tarnawsky

  Editing, Editors, Use

  "No Tall Tales". Interview with David Moscovich, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?

  Allen Ginsberg

  Sweat, Drug, Glimpse

  Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

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• There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Beautiful, Dream, Glasses

  "Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. 2008.

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• The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

  James Ellroy

  Book, Taken, Writing

  "The Onion talks to crime-fiction kingpin James Ellroy". Interview by John Krewson, www.avclub.com. November 20, 1996.

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• What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mistake, Voice, Less Is More

  "What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. July 16, 2016.

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• At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".

  Vera Nazarian

  Notebook, Reading, School

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

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• Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.

  Monica Wood

  Mistake, Reading, Character

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• I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Play, Fiction, Stories

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• Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Virginia, Signatures, Different

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Choices

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• The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

  Thomas Gray

  Support, Age, Doe

  Letter to West, 8 April 1742, in H. W. Starr (ed.) 'Correspondence of Thomas Gray' (1971) vol. 1, letter 103

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• Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

  Northrop Frye

  Writing, Aphorism, Translate

  Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz,'The Literature Professors' Literature Professor', in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall1978.

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