Prose Quotes - Page 7

• I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

  Buzz Bissinger

  Writing, Purple, Littles

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• Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

  W. H. Auden

  Listening, Remarks

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• If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions. . . . Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers. . . .

  Bodhidharma

  Truth, Break Through, Understanding

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.31, Macmillan

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• The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Practice, Facts

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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• Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

  F. L. Lucas

  Simple, Sound, Principles

  F. L. Lucas (2012). “Style: The Art of Writing Well”, p.229, Harriman House Limited

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• My heavens! I've been talking prose for the last forty years without knowing it.

  Moliere

  Talking, Years, Knowing

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• Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

  Moliere

  Scholarship, Scholar, Verses

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• Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.

  Victor Hugo

  Writing, Play, Tyrants

  "Les misérables".

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• I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

  John Updike

  Country, Athlete, Trying

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• Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Fall, Poetry, Goes On

  In M. St. J. Packe 'The Life of John Stuart Mill' (1954) bk. 1, ch. 2

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• We speak of memorizing as getting something 'by heart,' which really means 'by head.' But getting a poem or prose passage truly 'by heart' implies getting it by mind and memory and understanding and delight.

  John Hollander

  Memories, Heart, Mean

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• It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Men, Should

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

  Gilbert Highet

  Intimate Conversation, Dancing, Needs

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• Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Spring, Ambition, Cities

  Charles Baudelaire (2001). “The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo”, p.30

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• I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

  Jim Harrison

  Writing, Literature

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• I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

  Shelby Foote

  Writing, Interesting, Used

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• There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

  Gregory Bateson

  Strong, Believe, Energy

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• Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

  Christopher Fry

  Giving, Attention, Half

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• A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

  John Lahr

  Book, Artist, Theatre

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• Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Might, Discourse

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

  Jonathan Raban

  Presidential, Bars

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.462, Pan Macmillan

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• Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

  Winston Churchill

  Writing, Men, Forgiving

  Winston Churchill (2001). “The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill”, Michael O'Mara Books

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• 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.

  David Simon

  Reading, Mean, America

  Source: progressive.org

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• Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.

  Monica Wood

  Mistake, Reading, Character

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• One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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