Quotes About Prose

Two minutes later she walked into my office carrying her own copy of the report. "What did you think?" she said, sliding into a chair and waving the pages. "I don't like his prose style," I said. "And the plot seems very familiar." "Don't be an asshole," she said. "I got a briefing in a half hour, and I need to have something to say to everybody." I

Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

He tried to imagine what it had been like to be Hemingway, in Paris, in the 1920s. To write those clear, seemingly unadorned, yet complex sentences that would change forever the way Americans wrote prose. To do all that and then go out to dinner where you knew how to order the perfect seasonal wine to go with your huîtres. To be an American in Paris back when it was O.K. to be American.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

It's good for a story to have a strong style.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

For a profession that holds dear both the ability to vivisect politicians in prose and the expectation that these carved-up subjects will not complain, the media is horribly thin-skinned and vengeance-seeking when on the receiving end of criticism.

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.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.

The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it's a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected — compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose — maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

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

I hear echoes in your prose, echoes that run back to stuffy English drawing rooms and American universities. Is that what Canadians aspire to sound like?" She had taken a cigarette without appearing to watch what she was doing, and lighted it from a box of kitchen matches. I needed a cigarette myself, but was too wrapped up in what was being said to me to attempt to smoke. Gertrude blew a large smoke ring across the gap between us and watched it drift towards the ceiling.

When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing—you have its skeleton.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry" Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn't tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Cred c? poetul e într-o perpetu? revela?ie pe care proza n-o aduce, ceva rezervat celor pu?ini.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

To paraphrase Ezra Pound, don't imagine that the art of prose is any simpler than the art of music; spend as much time developing your craft as a pianist spends practicing scales. 'Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint, Pound argued in his 1913 essay, 'A Few Don'ts.