Prose Quotes - Page 17

• The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Funny, Life, America

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger. Chapter: "The Spirit of the Age", p. 18, 1954.

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• Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

  T. S. Eliot

  Christianity, Graves, Admiring

  1935 Religion and Literature.

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• And of all glad words of prose or rhyme, The gladdest are Act while there yet is time

  Franklin P. Adams

  Volunteer, Rhyme, Glad

  Franklin Pierce Adams, “Maud Muller Mutatur”

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• Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

  T. S. Eliot

  Typewriters, Long, Crafts

  T. S. Eliot (2011). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

  Mark Twain

  Schedules, Crafts, Landscape

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• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

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• Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

  William Zinsser

  Believe, Writing, Want

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• In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

  Lionel Shriver

  Writing, People, Finals

  "So Much For That". Interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, www.nationalbook.org. 2010.

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• I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Thinking, Literature

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• Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Plain Language, Imagination

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• An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Writing, Sound, Essentials

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• If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Water, Feelings

  Death in the Afternoon ch. 16 (1932)

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• There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

  Ernest Hemingway

  War, Book, Writing

  Ernest Hemingway, William Kozlenko (1942). “Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time”, New York : Crown Publishers

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• The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is telling.

  Leonard Michaels

  Song, Singing, Stories

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• The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

  Randall Jarrell

  Crafts, Narrative, Length

  "The Rumpus mini-interview project #102: Max Winter". Interview with Maria Anderson, therumpus.net. September 21, 2017.

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• Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Beautiful, Money

  Essays, Second Series "Nominalist and Realist" (1844)

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• I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

  Christian Wiman

  Writing, Discipline, World

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• There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

  Robert Graves

  Horse, Reading, Writing

  Robert Graves (2006). “The Long Weekend : a Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939: And, The Reader Over Your Shoulder : a Handbook for Writers of English Prose”, Carcanet Press

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• It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

  Robert Harris

  Flower, Writing, Thinking

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• Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.

  Donal Henahan

  Real, Artist, Next

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• How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?

  John Tillotson

  Education, Book, Fall

  John Tillotson (1714). “The works of the most reverend Dr. John Tillotson, late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: containing fifty four sermons and discourses on several occasions. Together with The Rule of Faith. Being all that were published by His Grace himself and now collected into one volume, to which is added an alphabetical table of the principle matter”, p.15

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• Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.

  Ken Tucker

  Writing, Generosity, Use

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• With a profound first-hand knowledge of participants, encompassing linguistic competence, and engaging prose, Padraic Kenney recreates the simultaneously serious and playful currents of East Europe's overthrow of repressive state socialism. What an invaluable guide to the elusive exhilaration that motivated the actors and captivated all of us who followed the transformation with such hope! We can appreciate neither the ebullience of 1989 nor the disappointment with the quotidian reality that followed without understanding Kenney's 'carnival.'

  Charles S. Maier

  Disappointment, Reality, Hands

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• The Ploughmen is as good a book as I’ve read in years. Kim Zupan’s language is as rich as Cormac McCarthy’s, and like Cormac’s, it comes from ground-zero of the heart. I’m also reminded of James Lee Burke’s sure-footed prose and delight in metaphor. Luminous...nothing short of brilliant...a firstnovel that leaves me impatient for the next.

  Rick DeMarinis

  Zero, Book, Heart

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• One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

  George Saintsbury

  Names, Two, Lateness

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.11, tredition

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