Always Quote by Joseph Brodsky

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

— Lauren Mayberry

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

— Helen Vendler

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

— Gustave Flaubert

I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.

— Gemma Files

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it…

— Jeff VanderMeer

I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.

— Alex Lemon

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

— F.W. Bateson

“Style is a sort of melody that comes into my sentences by itself. If a writer says what he has to say as accurately…

— George Bernard Shaw

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…

— Katie Kitamura

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.

— Horace Greeley

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

— Richard Whately

“The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a…

— Raymond Chandler