Prose Quotes - Page 30

• Prose proposes, verse reverses.

  Richard Howard

  Reverse, Propose, Verses

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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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• I dwell in Possibility A fairer house than Prose More numerous of Windows Superior — for Doors.

  Emily Dickinson

  Doors, House, Window

  "I dwell in possibility" l. 1 (ca. 1862)

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• . . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

  Orson Welles

  Writing, Film Critics, Impact

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

  Satya Nadella

  Couple, Essence, Trying

  "Satya Nadella named Microsoft CEO as Bill Gates steps down as chairman" by Dominic Rushe, www.theguardian.com. February 4, 2014.

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• Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, Passion, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies”, p.135, Simon and Schuster

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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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• If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

  Lorrie Moore

  Stories, Use, Narrative

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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• The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.

  George Brandis

  Hate, Style, Wanted

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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