Awful Quote by Martin Amis

“I think there is a naturally subversive role that writers play in any society, simply because they are trying to use language precisely, whereas…

— Vern Rutsala

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have…

— Per Petterson

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

“T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is…

— Iris Murdoch

“There is nothing that requires more precision, and purity of expression, than to write in a familiar style,' as the great English essayist William…

— Matt Weiland

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

— Michael Moriarty

“Just like money, we take writing for granted. Everybody reads and writes. No big deal. Actually, though, only a few hundred of the six…

— Mark David Ledbetter

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who…

— Linda Grant

“The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing,…

— Annie Dillard

It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a…

— Robertson Davies

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

— Steven Pinker