Quotes About Prose

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey and Tim Flannery are three that jump out from a single station of the alphabet (and that's not even to mention the late but godlike Richard Feynman)—but, sadly, none of them wrote any textbook I ever used.

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

For me," she wrote, "poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose." Throughout

Most contemporary novels are not really written. They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.

Bueno, hay un libro, esto es prosa, que yo salvaría, y es el Ulises. Yo pienso que el Ulises en alguna medida resume toda la literatura universal.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry.

Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.

No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.