Prose Quotes - Page 30

• A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.

  Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Brain, Matter, Causes

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• With Wings of the Butterfly, John Urbancik infuses his tale of shapeshifters, romance and pack rivalry with some unexpected and welcome surprises. Fluid prose, gore galore and all-too human characters make this unusual, fast-paced novella a must for fans who like their horror served blood-rare.

  Kealan Patrick Burke

  Butterfly, Character, Blood

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• Michael Bohn provides a rare opportunity to experience the American sporting scene in the Roaring Twenties. A constant stream of legendary characters marches across these pages.  You’ll meet them all: The Babe, The Four Horsemen, The Manassa Manassas Mauler, The Wheaton Iceman, Bill Tilden, Gertrude Ederle, and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter whose purple prose made them all come alive.

  Peter Golenbock

  Character, Opportunity, Purple

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• 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

  Essence, Important, Age

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• Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.

  Austin O'Malley

  Photography, Color, Oil

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• What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Communication, Writing, Language

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

  Clive James

  Writing, Prose And Poetry, Starvation

  "'I'm dying, I just look remarkably cheerful' says Clive James". "7.30" with Philip Williams, www.abc.net.au. August 19, 2015.

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• A lot of shows are more script-driven, like a prose script. As an actor, you never see a storyboard.

  Tom Kenny

  Actors, Scripts, Driven

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I love seeing the light go on in aspiring writers' eyes when you point out ways to improve their prose or their story - when they get it.

  F. Paul Wilson

  Eye, Light, Stories

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• 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

  Mind, Quality, Fiction

  "The Round Table: Fiction, Biography And The Use Of Power". Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, www.robertcaro.com. 1999.

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• I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

  Steve Martin

  Writing, Play, Long

  "Steve Martin: The Powells.com Interview". Interview with Jill Owens, www.powells.com. November 29, 2010.

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• I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

  China Mieville

  Mean, Facts, Minimalist

  Interview with Lou Anders, believermag.com. April 1, 2005.

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• 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

  Writing, Years, Two

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

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• Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families.

  Tom Johnson

  Writing, Order, Purple

  Source: ravenswoodpublishing.blogspot.com

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• I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

  Stanley Cavell

  Running, Philosophy, Thinking

  Source: www.bookforum.com

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• 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

  Real, Struggle, Writing

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Focus, Musical, Important

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• I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Practice, Attention, Want

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• 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

  Order, Needs, Attention

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Humble, Simple, Attention

  Source: slushpile.net

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• There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

  Cate Marvin

  Differences, Ears, Should

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Artist, Parent, Honor

  "True Myth: A Conversation With Sufjan Stevens". Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. February 16, 2015.

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• 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

  Beautiful, Daughter, Believe

  "Some Notes on the Novella". www.newyorker.com. October 29, 2012.

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• Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

  Audre Lorde

  Art, Writing, Typewriters

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• I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

  Winifred Holtby

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Winifred Holtby, Alice Holtby (1941). “Letters to a friend”

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