Quotes About Prose

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.

The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

Our very special love-friendship continued for many years after my emigration, in letters. In his witty, crystalline Czech prose he kept me connected to what I had left, and what I needed to forget so that I could remember it again, without pain.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

The world is full of poetry; it is sin which turns it into prose.

There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

description is deadly to a prose poem.

I never liked the term "experimental writing," but what else is a prose poem? Having written a number of them, I still don't know how they're written.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.

The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.

Lincoln's jogtrot prose, compacted of words and phrases still with the bark on, had no music their ears were attuned to; it crept by them.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

If you think while you write, you will enjoy it more and your prose will be more muscular and engaging.

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.