Prose Quotes - Page 8

• One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

  George Saintsbury

  Names, Two, Lateness

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.11, tredition

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• Ah! What avails the classic bent
  And what the cultured word,
  Against the undoctored incident
  That actually occurred?
  And what is Art whereto we press
  Through paint and prose and rhyme-
  When Nature in her nakedness
  Defeats us every time?

  Rudyard Kipling

  Art, Real, Classic

  Rudyard Kipling (1994). “The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling”, p.352, Wordsworth Editions

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• My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow.

  Cole Porter

  Song, Inspiration, Writing

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• Eva Stachniak has given readers a thrilling glimpse into the scandals and secrets at the heart of the Russian Imperial court. With deft prose and exquisite detail, Stachniak has resurrected one of the most compelling ages in history. Turn off the phones and lock the doors—you will not put it down.

  Deanna Raybourn

  Heart, Doors, Phones

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• I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

  Pauley Perrette

  Stuff, Kind, Satirical

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• There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Fiction, Pieces, Waste

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• Alethea Black can drop you into a dream with a single sentence, then convince you it's real. Her characters' best hopes and worst fears usually come to pass, often in fabulous ways, but their adventures feel inevitable and true-not only because Ms. Black richly imagines her people, but because she loves them. I Knew You'd Be Lovely is a lovely debut, with masterful prose and inspired invention on every page.

  Ralph Lombreglia

  Dream, Real, Adventure

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• Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson's first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.

  Christine Schutt

  Hurt, Broken, Seductive

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• The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.

  Gail Caldwell

  Lovely, Honor, Triumph

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• Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. She dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.

  Jaimy Gordon

  Unique, Play, Voice

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• I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

  Sol Stein

  Book, Writing, Tired

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• Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

  Elmore Leonard

  Writing, Exclamation Points, Two

  "Elmore Leonard's rules for writers". www.theguardian.com. February 24, 2010.

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• Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

  Tracy Kidder

  Writing, Revision

  Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd (2013). “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction”, p.19, Random House

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• The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Attention, Faults

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes”, p.214

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• I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

  David Antin

  Long, Format, Manage

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• Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

  Julian Barnes

  Selfish, Good Love, Writing

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• My medium is prose, not the novel.

  David Shields

  Novel, Mediums

  David Shields (2010). “Reality Hunger”, p.23, Vintage

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• In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.

  Michael Dirda

  Art, Husband, Character

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• I am not a great prose stylist. I'm a storyteller. There are thousands of people who don't like what I do. Fortunately, there are millions who do.

  James Patterson

  People, Stylist, Storyteller

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• What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Training, Form

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• The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

  Rick Moody

  Personality, Trying, Process

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• I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Screens

  "Sculpting in Time". Book by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986.

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• Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.

  Jairam Ramesh

  Government, Agitation, Governance

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• The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

  George Orwell

  Past, Race, Years

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.139, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius.

  Ramsey Campbell

  Honesty, Unique, Vision

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