Prose Quotes - Page 18

• I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Fun, Games, Guy

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• Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

  Robert Graves

  Dog, Book, Cat

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

  William E. Gladstone

  Successful, Mediocrity, Poet

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• 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.

  Laurence Overmire

  Deception, Overcoming, Honest

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• I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

  Story Musgrave

  Space, Technique, Looks

  "NASA Distinguished Service Medal". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. May 22, 1997.

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• With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

  Robert Morgan

  Special, Details, Way

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• Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

  Eugenio Montale

  Creative, Height, Comedy

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• All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

  Moliere

  Literature, Verses

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• There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Mean, People

  Stephen King (2016). “Misery: A Novel”, p.125, Simon and Schuster

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• Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

  H. L. Mencken

  Lucky Charms, Done, Literature

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.166, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Ideas, Lasts, Facts

  "On the one hand ..." by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. December 22, 2007.

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• If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

  Hilary Mantel

  Play, Ideas, Stories

  "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

  Ted Hughes

  Healing, Doe, Etcetera

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• Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Birthday, Age, Aging

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• Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

  Tommy Lee Jones

  Views, Perfect, Stylist

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• But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Religious, Chinese, Sublime

  Lafcadio Hearn (2012). “Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn”, p.107, tredition

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• Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

  George William Curtis

  Memories, Romantic Love, Romance

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• Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Effort, Today

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• Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

  Tracy Kidder

  Writing, Revision

  Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd (2013). “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction”, p.19, Random House

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• So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

  John Drinkwater

  Kind, Failing, Mood

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”

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• Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Writing, Hair, Shining

  "Author, author: The Slow Language Movement" by Nick Laird, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2009.

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• It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!

  Edith Schaeffer

  Beautiful, Writing, Eye

  Edith Schaeffer (1972). “Hidden art”

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• Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius.

  Ramsey Campbell

  Honesty, Unique, Vision

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• In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.

  Michael Dirda

  Art, Husband, Character

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• An up-close portrait of middle-class Nigeria exploring the boundaries of morals and public decorum. Pitched between humor and despair, with stripped-down, evocative prose, A Bit of Difference bristles with penknife-sharp dialogue, but its truths are more subtle, hiding in the unspoken. Ultimately, A Bit of Difference explores – with a hint of mischief–the problem of how to look like you have no problems when you have abundant problems–the universal problem of the socially-motivated classes.

  Nii Parkes

  Class, Differences, Despair

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