Quotes About Prose

The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard. --Disgrace

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.

'M Train' will take you in and out of dreamscapes and reality and remembrances with prose so spare and matter-of-fact that it delivers a much bigger emotional punch. Patti Smith doesn't need to embellish; she just tells her stories... and her stories are incredible.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Written words can also sing.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.

words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception.

On the front cover of Newsweek reviews A House for Mr. Biswas as a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.

I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

La nouvelle prose, c'est l'événement, le combat lui-même, et non sa description. Un document, la participation directe de l'auteur aux événements de la vie. Une prose vécue, en document.

Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.

It was not a happy ending, but a happy middle - at last, after so many fraught beginnings. Their story would be long. Much would be written of them, some of it in verse, some sung, and some in plain prose, in volumes to be penned for the archives of cities not yet built.

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 ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.

I began to wonder if writers don't choose to love long-distance, a sure way of blending passion and prose. The love letter seems perfectly suited to the contradiction of a writer's life... the love letter may be the emblem of a vocation that demands solitude but desires communication.

Don't have stories; have sentences.

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

The first child in a family is its poem, — it is a sort of nativity play, and we bend before the younger stranger with gifts, "gold, frankincense, and myrrh." But the tenth child in a poor family is prose, and gets simply what is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities, about the tenth cradle.

The opening sentence alone contained thirty-six words—monstrous