Prose Quotes · Page 11

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

— Randall Jarrell

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

— Kapil Sibal

When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

— Miroslav Penkov

I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.

— William Beckett

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

— Sylvia Plath

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— Tommy Lee Jones

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

— Robert Breault

“... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which…

— Robert Musil

Writing a play, you have to retain it all in your head - you need more time. With prose, you can snatch…

— Nell Leyshon

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image…

— Thomas Gray

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never…

— Matthea Harvey

Full of fun, over-the-top characters and witty prose, with a touch of gay romance that is equally pleasing to straight readers. The…

— Rhys Bowen

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be…

— Gilbert Highet

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in…

— Plato

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets…

— Julian Barnes

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places,…

— James Fenton

I think the most reliable way to teach it is through reading work aloud over and over. Many prose writers been encouraged…

— Paul Lisicky

There are some simple maxims which I think might be commended to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word…

— Bertrand Russell

Fischer was a good kid but very unsophisticated about anything but chess. It was all chess for him, every waking moment. We'd…

— Ronald Gross

Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that…

— Robert Frost

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also…

— Sam Shepard

“[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that…

— F.W. Bateson

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It…

— John Barth

“I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that…

— Vladimir Nabokov

I believe he loved a lot of things about me, yet was afraid to accept. He said he never ended it because…

— Dominic Riccitello

“Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”

— Beverley Nichols

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

— Denise Mina

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

— Horace Walpole

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

— Ian Mcewan

Habit is the best thing for you if you’re trying to write prose.

— Alan Cheuse

“If anything can be said in prose, then poetry should be saved for saying nothing.”

— Pierre Albert-Birot

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

— Jeffery Deaver

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

— Jorge Luis Borges

It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!

— Edith Schaeffer

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

— Khalil Gibran

“I seek the city because there is nothing sweeter than not being alone in your loneliness.”

— Charlotte Eriksson

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

— Virginia Woolf

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

— David Antin