Quotes About Prose

I am one who shares Saul Bellow's estimate of Hemingway rather than John Updike's. I could pick up any book of his and turn to any page and read and the poetry of his prose kills me.

De alguna manera, entre ellos descubrieron cómo cortar la grasa sin sacrificar nada del sabor de mi prosa.

Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.

What sort of scientists are they whose main technique is sociability and whose main instrument is themselves? What can we expect from them but charged prose and pretty theories?

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

The prose," Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

Bixiou. "Don't you think all that is a little too florid? I should tone down the poetry. 'Imperial idol!' 'bent the knee!' damn it, my dear fellow, writing vaudevilles has ruined your style; you can't come down to pedestrial prose. I should say, 'He belonged to the small number of those who.' Simplify, simplify! the man himself was a simpleton.

Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.

No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.

creativity and imagination are as crucial to the life writing project as they are to fiction and poetry. We'll explore, and attempt, both autobiography and biography in Part 4, and in activities you'll be able to form your writing into poetry and/or prose.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.

I might have some sort of personality disorder. I might not have proper filters; it might be some kind of version of Asperger's meets Tourettes meets prose.