Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Prose. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Prose Quotes And Sayings by 97 Authors including David Simon,Walter Savage Landor,Edgar Allan Poe,Anne Carson,Alison Hawthorne Deming for you to enjoy and share.
Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".
I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
The problem in this world is that we have poetry but insist on living in prose.
See how weak prose is ... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.
Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
Writing is seduction.
We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.
Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Please bury me in the library
With a dozen long-stemmed proses
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Writing is the silence of the soul struggling to be heard
Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.
For the prose artist the world is full of other people's words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
Prose pretends to be straightforward in its application to the truth, but truth itself is a dissembler. Poetry, much more honest, knows the deception can't be overcome.
Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
I am not a great prose stylist. I'm a storyteller. There are thousands of people who don't like what I do. Fortunately, there are millions who do.
I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.
Writing satisfies us.
The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes.
There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.
Prose before hoes, muthafucka! I'll be right over.
I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.
Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
Reading was my hobby, my sport and my activity of choice. It was the prime pleasure of my days, an unfailing escape from whatever realities were distressing me, and the only source of pride I knew, other vanities lying beyond my grasp. I couldn't do anything else well, but I could do words.
In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage. The
Literature is language charged with meaning
I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
Prose is all about embellishing and describing.
When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.
Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought.
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.
Almost everybody considers himself capable of thinking and, to a certain degree, whether right or wrong, really does think. Very few, on the contrary, can fancy themselves poets or artists in words. But from the moment when thought won out over style, the mob invaded the novel.
Writing is the most powerful weapon on earth.It can change minds and stir souls.
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.
My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me.
Writing is an adventure.
A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.
literature," I said. "What's
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
The structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it
words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.
Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.
The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
Writing is like a charcoal painting, a black and white story
I like the way the prose and poetry interact.
There is no prose as inspiring as a single human being with the courage to live well.
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 can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.
Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable
campaign in poetry and govern in prose" - and
Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Literature is a vast ocean, in which one has to drown themselves to be able to conquer it. Those on shore can see a side of it or have tasted a part of it. And I choose to drown myself in it than just to see it.
Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.
Our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.
Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
I don't believe in literature-I believe in conversation.
Fiction - and poetry and drama - cleanse the doors of perception.
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.
Literature is humanity talking to itself.
Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)
I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.