Quotes About Prose

Joyce llevó a la prosa de ficción la precisión y la riqueza de recursos retóricos de la poesía. Supo, como había sabido Flaubert, que la poesía es lo que rescata y eleva el lenguaje de la novela.

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

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.

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu . Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

The novel must tell a story.

Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, 'The Birds' - it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

I've always been fond of Tim Drake/Robin. I suppose it's the YA writer in me. I enjoy the intensity of young, smart heroes. I'd love to write him in either graphic or prose form.

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Demanding historical (or scientific) veracity as a prerequisite for truth is another kind of tunnel vision. To do so is to mistake poetry for prose.

Prose lies its way to the truth

I asked what you love, you said, 'Anything with words.'