Prose Quotes - Page 31

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1998). “Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew”, The Eighth Mountain Press

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

  Lord Byron

  Lying, Evil, Clay

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• The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.

  Lord Byron

  Simple, Example, Wordsworth

  'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' (1809) l. 241 (of Wordsworth)

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• We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

  Ernst Haas

  Writing, Prose And Poetry, Needs

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• I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

  Andre Dubus

  Essence, Looks, Way

  Source: entertainmentrealm.com

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• I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

  PJ Harvey

  Writing, Ideas, Stories

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

  Nicholson Baker

  Distance, Struggle, Book

  "Nicholson Baker Navigates The Buffet". Interview with Jared Levy, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 16, 2013.

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• Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

  Charles Stross

  Reading, Writing, Style

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. July 02, 2012.

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• [Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

  George Orwell

  Political Language, House, Together

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.159, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Interesting, Way, Talent

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Judith Baughman (1994). “A Life in Letters”, p.455, Simon and Schuster

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• I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

  Anthony Burgess

  Strong, Writing, Littles

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• I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.

  Neal Stephenson

  Book, Style, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Creating, Interesting, Magic

  "Francesca Lia Block’s Elements Of Style". Interview with Jennifer Sky, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 15, 2012.

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• An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.

  William C. Brown

  Spiritual, Exercise, Emotional

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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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