Prose Quotes · Page 15

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

— Nicholson Baker

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

— Virginia Woolf

Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

— Joyce Johnson

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

— Charlotte Eriksson

“To write past events in the present tense adds immediacy to your prose. ~Yvonne Blackwood”

— Yvonne Blackwood

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

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

— Peter Davison

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and…

— Edvard Munch

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but…

— James Patterson

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed…

— Edmund Clarence Stedman

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to…

— Lori Lansens

“I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry…and I think it's…

— L.M. Montgomery

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't…

— Camille Paglia

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a…

— Eugenio Montale

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power…

— John Cheever

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare…

— Lafcadio Hearn

Writing for publication is an art, a craft, and a business, so you need to develop skill sets in multiple areas. You…

— Brian Hodge

“My prose was clunky compared to his. I got hung up on diction and syntax; I agonized over every word. Matt's prose…

— M. Pierce

The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics…

— Masha Tupitsyn

[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but…

— Kingsley Amis

“They're waiting for you to say all these grand statements, you know? You march across the room and you're supposed to say…

— Charles Bukowski

“There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a…

— Charlotte Eriksson

I think when you're writing prose there's a lot of attendant description and that's were I used to really go bananas. With…

— Diablo Cody

“Later when they would mention, they would say, and everyone would know, but not nearly as well as they meant.”

— Mikl Paul

“They rolled up the path, tree branches raking the windshield like angry wardens.”

— R.J. Lawrence

Before you came the world was prose. Now poetry is born.

— Nizar Qabbani

“A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.”

— Rachel Kushner

I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.

— William Hazlitt

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.

— Austin O'Malley

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

— Horace Walpole

“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

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

— Tommy Lee Jones

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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Khalil Gibran