Prose Quotes - Page 12

• To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Mind, Quality

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Prose And Poetry, Differences, Important

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Thinking, Sound, Cadence

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

  Pattiann Rogers

  White, Space, Silence

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Heart, Thinking, Language

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, People, Mind

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.

  Denise Duhamel

  Letting Go, Writing, Lines

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

  Melissa Febos

  Smart, Writing, College

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.

  Julianna Baggott

  Beautiful, Writing, Cutting

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Writing, Feet, People

  "Quentin Tarantino: 'Inglourious' Child Of Cinema". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 28, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, People

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Writing, Voice, Louis Brandeis

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Memorable, Balance, Louis Brandeis

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

  Matthea Harvey

  Sheep, Wool, Would Be

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.

  Matthea Harvey

  Writing, Thinking, Pants

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

  Matthea Harvey

  People, Want, Natural

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

  Matthea Harvey

  Art, Differences, Fiction

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

  Matthea Harvey

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

  Yuriy Tarnawsky

  Editing, Editors, Use

  "No Tall Tales". Interview with David Moscovich, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've done a lot of going back and forth with my own writing, in particular translating my English language stuff into Ukrainian - poetry as well as prose. But I actually hate doing it. It is a thankless, mind-numbing process, additionally unpleasant for me because it reminds me of my ambiguous status of not belonging anywhere.

  Yuriy Tarnawsky

  Hate, Writing, Mind

  "No Tall Tales: An Interview With Yuriy Tarnawsky". Interview With David Moscovich, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?

  Allen Ginsberg

  Sweat, Drug, Glimpse

  Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Beautiful, Dream, Glasses

  "Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

  James Ellroy

  Book, Taken, Writing

  "The Onion talks to crime-fiction kingpin James Ellroy". Interview by John Krewson, www.avclub.com. November 20, 1996.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mistake, Voice, Less Is More

  "What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. July 16, 2016.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I guess: People who are comfortable enough with reality to allow other sorts of realities and other mindsets to just be, and then to regard these with real interest and joy [and the joy appears in the prose quality itself].

  George Saunders

  Real, People, Joy

  "George Saunders on Trump, Mystery, and Why He Rejects Social Media". Interview with Catherine Woodiwiss, sojo.net. August 30, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source