Quotes About Prose

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

A prose-writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

Prose is too coarse, too heavy for romance — We need poetry for love & all things of chance.

A poet is too impatient for prose. He needs an expressway to his emotions.

When you unprose language, does it become poetry?

Prose is a photograph, poetry a painting in oil-colors.

Shredded prose is prose Twisted in heat to occasional rhythms, And broken savagely into irregular lengths, And packed and sold as verse. Yet Our lives and thoughts are prose, With only occasional bursts of rhythmic rapture And with frequent broken jumps of change. And so the prose-shredder Often hits us in more intimate spots Than the versifier, It must be admitted.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That's a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

Avoid the suave flow of prose that's the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language ... than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

It was a distinction, my dear Dorian — a great distinction. Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

Praise for JAMES LEE BURKE "James Lee Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir." —The New York Times Book Review "A gorgeous prose stylist." —Stephen King "James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed." —Michael Connelly "Burke's evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.

There were aspects of stardom I didn't like, which were of no consequence, really, but the positive things far outweighed the negative. By the time I came to write 'Setting Sons,' I felt my writing was more like prose, set to music.

If you're going to make a statement, I think you should write it in prose and make a statement. If you have characters who are mouthpieces for a point of view, then you have to be very clever about disguising it.

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Melody, for Baroque composers, is prose, not poetry. It does not come in paired lines (like a folk song, or a Schubert Lied), but in rhetorical sentences or paragraphs.

I'd be happy to give special treatment to a dedicated school teacher, or even someone like William Faulkner if he was still alive, because despite the fact that an exegesis of his prose completely eluded me, I had to admit, especially when Jacob held me down and made me say it, that the guy was a kick-ass architect of the ever-elusive sentence.

I don't very often read novels.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry