Prose Quotes - Page 2

• A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

  Samuel McChord Crothers

  Writing, Tired, Poetry

  Samuel McChord Crothers (1920). “The Dame School of Experience, and Other Papers”

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• Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

  George Orwell

  Writing, Window Panes, Should

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• The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

  George Orwell

  Atmosphere, Literature, Orthodoxy

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1969). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII: 1838-1842”, p.316, Harvard University Press

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• Poetry: the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Vocabulary, Prose Poetry

  Table Talk 12 July 1827 (1835)

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• I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Clever, Prose And Poetry, Prose Poetry

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.84

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• In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Funny, Birthday, Witty

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• She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

  E. M. Forster

  Love, Passion, Men

  Howards End (1910) ch. 22 (the title-page also has "Only connect...")

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• After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Mean, Poetry, Everyday

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• I think the underlying purpose is expression. It's not about technique, it's not about hitting the right note, writing the perfect prose, having the perfect brushstroke. It's about expression of oneself, the things around you, and the emotions. I think expression is the one word that I would use, whether it's for sorrow, tragedy, joy, or even the need to express and be heard.

  Charlie Albright

  Writing, Thinking, Expression

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• So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Effort, Want

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

  Robert Frost

  Baseball, Writing, Distinction

  Robert Frost (1968). “Selected prose of Robert Frost”

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• I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

  J. D. Salinger

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  "Seymour: An Introduction (1959)". "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction". Book by J. D. Salinger, 1963.

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• Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

  Judy Collins

  Sorry, Fun, Writing

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• Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

  John Updike

  Writing, Should Have, Voice

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• Details are the Life of Prose.

  Jack Kerouac

  Writing, Details

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• To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Writing, Ambition, Blood

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• Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

  Walter Pater

  Writing, Poetry, Difficult

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• It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

  Robert Lowell

  Powerful, Book, Years

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• For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jobs, Real, Writing

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• In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Creativity, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.157

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• I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Writing, Wish, Want Him

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• You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Book, Reading, Writing

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• Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Thinking, Choices

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• The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

  Thomas Gray

  Support, Age, Doe

  Letter to West, 8 April 1742, in H. W. Starr (ed.) 'Correspondence of Thomas Gray' (1971) vol. 1, letter 103

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