Quotes About Prose

there is a good deal more prose than poetry in life.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

For several years now, Kipling had been sprinkling his prose and poetry with anti-German barbs. He believed this war would do "untold good" for his beloved British tommies, preparing them for the inevitable clash with Germany. The Boer War, said a character in a story he wrote at the time, was "a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.

Bad prose is the bugbear of genre fiction.

writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets.

Nightwood is demanding. You can slide into it, because the prose has a narcotic quality, but you can't slide over it. The language is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. –

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational." The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn...

You know the fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

It is a radiant parenthesis, a poetic interlude in the prose of life.

Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer, capable of synthesizing vast amounts of material and rendering it in clear, elegant prose.