Prose Quotes - Page 32

• 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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• 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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• 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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• When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

  Robert Morgan

  Character, Thinking, Ideas

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• Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."

  William Congreve

  Hair, Poetry, Letters

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• I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

  Lauren Mayberry

  Reading, Thinking, Tone

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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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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• Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

  Ernst Haas

  Taken, Reality, Views

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• If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

  Steven Morrissey

  Music, Fall, Writing

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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 decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

  Robert Morgan

  Reading, Writing, Decision

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• Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.

  Voltaire

  Years, Two, Luxury

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• Before you came
  the world was prose.
  Now poetry is born.

  Nizar Qabbani

  World, Born, Poetry Is

  Nizar Qabbani, “Two African Breasts”

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• We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.

  Brian D. McLaren

  God, Christian, Humble

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• Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

  Derek Walcott

  Summer, Lemons

  Derek Walcott (1969). “In a green night: poems, 1948-1960”, Jonathan Cape

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• In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

  James Kelman

  Integrity, Drama, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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