Quotes About Prose

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of exterior things: for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night. But to write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral: there one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help: on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose--musical, but without (conventional) rhythm and rhyme, and supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Prose divides shame into stations.

In the end, all that a writer has to pass on is not myth and anecdote, but scene and character, evoked in memorable prose.

adopted the spare prose of a journalist, with an emphasis on time, date, and place

campaign in poetry and govern in prose"—and

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

The melody is the soul of all poetry and prose.

Poetry and prose can start a revolution, break walls, and ideas can build nations.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.

Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but sometimes always, my God, never. Svatislav Richter, to the second flute at Covent Garden PEOPLE HAVE THOUGHT prose style many things—persuasion or mere music, duty or pastime, ornament only, the man himself. It has been left for Americans to think it a problem: the National Problem, the Communications Problem.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. 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.

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.

Mother Dolores Hart's prose is a reflection of the inner beauty she has always possessed. A fascinating read... and read again!

I am not a fan of books.