Quotes About Prose

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Some writers have beautiful poetry inside that explodes from the pen into prose. Others hold their inner prose until it implodes to poetry.

literature," I said. "What's

she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularise, mentioned such works by our best moralists, such collections of fine letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind.

Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer acquaintance - so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

David foster Wallace: '...the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail.[...] he trains you to study the world through the lens of his prose.' NYTimes, 7 Feb 2016

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.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life.

Meredith is a prose Browning. So is Browning.

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start. (Interview, The Paris Review , Issue 64, Winter 1975)

Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum. Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?

It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own.

It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.

In 1719—at the age of 59—Defoe turned his attention for the first time to an extended work of prose fiction, presenting his account of events of which he had no direct experience. Robinson Crusoe, the account of the shipwreck and survival of one man, became a great success, and Defoe turned his full attention to his lucrative writing career.

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means "inquiry" or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty.

prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts - technical expositions, jargon of all sorts - fictional and other - poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.