Quotes About Prose

Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemised words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

He said a political writer must be careful. He quoted Auden: A writer's politics are more dangerous to him than his cupidity. He said, Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity. There is a kind of death that creeps into your prose when you're trying to illustrate a principle, no matter how worthy.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

O era su pertenencia a la UJA la pequeña verdad con que Marco había amasado las mentiras de su primera posguerra —la minúscula poesía épica con que había intentado teñir la prosa general de su vida—, del mismo modo que su estancia en el frente del Segre era la pequeña verdad con que había amasado sus mentiras de la guerra?

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.

Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see 's been dubbed by [Us] into RP, Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us] your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.

Niko? I have decided to christen this little pool Le Cagot's Soul." "Oh?" "Yes. Because it is clear and pure and lucid." "And treacherous and dangerous?" "You know, Niko, I begin to suspect that you are a man of prose. It is a blemish on you." "No one's perfect." "Speak for yourself.

We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

(Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island , Spring, 1993.