Quotes About Writing

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

I read some older books when I worked at Barnes And Noble, like some of the American classics. I read a lot of Hemingway. I fell in love with Hemingway's prose and with the way he wrote. I feel like he's talking to me, like we're in a bar and he's not trying to jazz it up and sound smart, he's just being him.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

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

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It's the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing 'four years later', but you can shift time in a sentence or two.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

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

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

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

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.