Prose Quotes - Page 8

• After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.

  Robert Hass

  Expression, Ideas, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Of course, there are hundreds of novels and authors that have influenced me. But to choose three, they are: Stephen King/The Stand (and really most of his books); Anne Rice/The Witching Hour; and Pat Conroy/The Prince of Tides. These authors write my favorite kind of book - epic feel, gorgeous prose, unique characters, and a pace that keeps you turning the pages. From them, I learned a lot about characterization, pacing, prose, voice, and originality.

  Megan Chance

  Kings, Book, Character

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• David Foster Wallace was a brilliant experimentalist who I deeply admire. His ability to do formalism helped me understand how to tackle stories like "Dictionary" and "Failed Revolution." "Dictionary," in particular, functions against narrative in many ways - each of the definitions are their own mini-story or prose poem, and the collection of them adds up to create a different effect than the traditional Freytagian Pyramid story.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Pyramids, Definitions, Narrative

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.

  John Darnielle

  Writing, Reality, Masters

  "Lyrical Genius John Darnielle Wrote a Scary New Novel". Interview With Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2017.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Book, Musical, Way

  "Bruce Springsteen: On Jersey, Masculinity And Wishing To Be His Stage Persona". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, radio.krcb.org. September 15, 2017.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• [John Adams's] vividly descriptive prose is supremely quotable. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Heart, Ambition, Insecurity

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• James Baldwin had an unrivaled understanding of politics and history and, above all, the human condition. His prose is laser sharp. His onslaught is massive and leaves no room for response. Every sentence is an immediate cocked grenade. You pick it up, then realize that it is too late. It just blows up in your face. And yet he still managed to stay human, tender, accessible.

  Raoul Peck

  Blow, Understanding, Lasers

  Source: www.theskanner.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

  George Saunders

  Real, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

  George Saunders

  Levels, Feels, High Level

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my personal and spiritual life, I reject that. I don't believe in that. I'm always trying to get my mind into a less judgmental place, making less rigid judgments about things like "perverse" versus "pure." But in terms of prose, those sorts of oppositions seem to work.

  George Saunders

  Spiritual, Believe, Always Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Thinking, Style

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Writing, Trying, Care

  4 Copy quote

• I dwell in possibilities... a fairer house than prose.

  Emily Dickinson

  House, Possibility

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

  Sylvia Plath

  Teenager, Writing, Long

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Artist, Fiction, Agents

  Source: www.terrain.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

  Robert Hass

  Long, Fiction And Nonfiction, Pressure

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Example, Sometimes, Film

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

  Thornton Wilder

  Book, Reading, Air

  7 Copy quote

• I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Play, Fiction, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Virginia, Signatures, Different

  4 Copy quote

• That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Yield, Inspired

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

  Frederick Busch

  Beautiful, Sitting Still, Worry

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

  Frederick Busch

  Fall, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

  Theodora Goss

  Self, Conscious, Poetry Is

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The question now becomes about defining your terms. What is literature? Unless we allow it to encompass the oral tradition from which it grew, which means taking it back to Homer and beyond, it demands the written word - poetry and prose. [Bob] Dylan is no slouch at the written word, both in its own right, and transcribed from his lyrics, which have often been acclaimed as poetry and may well stand up as such. But that is not his métier.

  David Bennun

  Mean, Oral Tradition, Literature

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source