Quotes About Prose

The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett's Waiting for Godot they're speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves.

Beautiful feelings make bad literature. In which case, this precious state of prose is proof that I'm no devil after all. Ah, blessed be the man who coined this phrase! It is a treasure of the language. An author can get away with using it but once in his career. Sad to say. The first time, it's endearing. If you insist on using it a second or a third time, though, dear reader, hiding behind it like a shield, you can expect nothing but misery.

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

I learned to love the feel of good words.

the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O'Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin,

the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño's prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.

And all else is literature.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors.

Cuál es la diferencia entre un guion y una novela? La una es un relato cuya principal herramienta es la palabra, y el otro basa su impacto en las imágenes sin prescindir de la palabra, por eso hay guiones a los que se les califica de muy literarios, porque los personajes hablan mucho.

Si uno diluye un buen poema en un litro de agua consigue un cuento regular. Si uno diluye ese cuento en diez litros de agua, consigue una novela innecesaria.

The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.