Quotes About Prose

The revolutionary thing about Borges's prose is that it contains almost as many ideas as words, for his precision and concision are absolutes.

Dentro de esta tradición, la prosa literaria creada por Borges es una anomalía, pues desobedece íntimamente la predisposición natural de la lengua española hacia el exceso, optando por la más estricta parquedad.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted. The oldest surviving complete book of Latin prose, Cato's second-century-B.C. practical guide to rural life, De agricultura, suggests eating cabbage this way: If you want your cabbage chopped, washed, dried, sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier.

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse — you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that 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.

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.

Aphorism or maxim, let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the great objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books.

Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.

I think it's easy to see with the existence of these forms, the intermixing of prose and poetry, that they are really two sides of the same coin and that one doesn't do well without something of the other. Prose falls flat on its face without incorporating the dance of poetry and poetry has no voice without the narrative touch of prose.

Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.

Adopting the prose poem, allowed me to think and write more openly and broadly, and to extend and sustain a subject or object of attention more that I could in a verse poem.

When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

I'm out of the terse Hemingway school.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, to take pleasure in solid objects and scrapes of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

the complex responses prompted by the word 'Orwellian' which still carry force: fear, integrity, directness, concern for language, plain prose, individual humanity, a striving to see things as they really are, a willingness to admit error, and, above all, the concept of a sense of decency in human relations.

Jättes kõrvale vajaduse elatist teenida, on minu meelest kirjutamisel, vähemalt proosa kirjutamisel, neli suurt motiivi. Erineval määral eksisteerivad nad igas kirjanikus, proportsiooniti aeg-ajalt varieerudes vastavalt õhkkonnale, milles ta elab.

To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and—like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is—looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

I'm not really a book person, to be honest.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.