Quotes About Prose

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

Un estilo interesante consiste en una sucesión constante de diminutas, casi indetectables, sorpresas en el texto

Under Magnolia is much more than an entrancing memoir: it is a work of art that defies the distinction between prose and poetry or novels and autobiographies. It is also much more than a personal narrative: it is an unflinching meditation on the relation between self and culture, and, more specifically, on the gravitational pull of memory. This is a book to be savored, a feast for both mind and soul.

I just read, the letter, your essays, again and again, convinced that such prose does not exist merely for its own sake, but serves as a signpost on the road to a human being, a road one keeps following, happier and happier, until arriving at the realisation some bright moment that one is not progressing, simply running around inside one's own labyrinth, only more nervously, more confused than before.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.

You can probably also call it poetic justice, even though it doesn't rhyme.

Nous effectuions comme des progrès de poésie rien qu'à l'admirer d'être tellement belle et tellement plus inconsciente que nous. Le rythme de sa vie jaillissait d'autres sources que les nôtres

But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impossible prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.

I wanted to read someone who rose above the romanticism of most women writers. I wanted robust prose; I wanted muscle and sinew, even if it was a love story.

It is hardly a coincidence that the cadences of Chambers's HUAC testimony should anticipate the prose of Witness . The House Committee on Un-American Activities had given him his true voice...

Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

All human things are subject to decay,And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obeyThis Flecknoe found, who like Augustus youngWas call'd to empire, and had govern'd longIn prose and verse, was own'd, without disputeThrough all the realms of nonsense, absolute.

Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.

Details are the Life of Prose.