Quotes About Prose

I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens - something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

Flaubert complains in a letter to Colet, "What a bitch of a thing prose is! It's never finished; there's always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world -- it is like operetta in prose -- all so flowery and heavenlike.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

Because it's all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.

A good reader pays attention to everything. The surface of the prose. The structure of the book. The tense. The point of view. Perhaps to those even before the characters. Then comes the setting. The story can often come last.

Pero eso, tragedias en prosa, es lo que son las novelas que he mencionado, o así he llegado a pensar de ellas" (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Los demonios, Bajo la mirada de Occidente, Mientras agonizo y Bajo el volcán)

La buena prosa debe ser tan precisa como el verso, e igual de sonora" escribe Flaubert.