Prose Quotes - Page 31

• The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Prose And Poetry, Fog, Wire

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.104, Grove Press

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• the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Writing, Gripping

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• It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Tests, Should, Apprehension

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• Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.

  Erica Jong

  Simple, Actors, Television

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• There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Writing, Hands

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• Barry recounts all this in prose of often startling beauty. Just as he describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down.

  Margot Livesey

  People, Stopping, Looks

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• He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton

  Bill Vaughan

  Writing, Firsts, Temples

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• My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, "You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning."

  Tao Lin

  Book, Like You, Said

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Thinking, Differences

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.

  Donald Miller

  Book, Pieces, Has Beens

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• And write what you love - dont feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny. You're a reader as well as a writer, so write what you'd want to read.

  Cassandra Clare

  Writing, Serious, Feels

  Interview with Cheryl Brody, www.seventeen.com. March 05, 2008.

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• Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

  Jessye Norman

  Wise, Kindness, Book

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• Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Book, Thinking, Stories

  "Michael Morpurgo's top tips for writing". www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2011.

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• The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read.

  Aminatta Forna

  Powerful, Important, Narrators

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• Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Reading, People, Musical

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Once again...Rick Bass draws us into his magical human worlds, rendered urgently by a hypnotic prose that tracks a parallel and untamed natural world, often with a trace of loss and always patrolled by unmistakable decency. He is a master of this form.

  Doug Peacock

  Loss, Track, Untamed

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• The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete.

  Sue Grafton

  Pieces, Paper, Liquid

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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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• 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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• An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.

  William C. Brown

  Philosophy, Practice, Age

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• The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together.

  Masha Tupitsyn

  Mean, Thinking, Space

  "https://logger.believermag.com/post/2013/10/24/true-lovers-are-as-rare-as-true-rebels". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. October 24, 2013.

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• Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.

  Howard Zinn

  Political, Important, Agitation

  "Interview with Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States". Interview with Sean Carswell and Todd Taylor, razorcake.org. October 18, 2001.

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• Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists:  Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Religious, Art, Passionate

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• Once in a rare while, you get to read a story of such breathtaking beauty and intelligence that you remember why you love to read. The Anatomy Lesson is just such a novel. In stunning prose, Nina Siegal animates Rembrandt's first masterpiece, spinning a deeply affecting tale of love, loss and redemption as she reveals the secrets of the human soul. It is a gorgeous literary page turner of immense sympathy and elegance, equal in artistic lan to its inspiration. Brava!

  Robin Oliveira

  Inspiration, Loss, Soul

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• Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

  Michael Tippett

  Changed, Poetry Is, Extras

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