Prose Quotes - Page 9

• The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Book, Titles, Transformation

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Source: www.oxfordjournals.org

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• I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

  Matthew Healy

  Mean, Imagination, Story Writers

  Source: blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu

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• The one difference between comics and, say, cinema or prose, is that you've only got so many pages, and publishers will work to a set page count. So you have to work out how many pages you actually have and how much to allow for each story.

  Leah Moore

  Differences, Work Out, Pages

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Song, Writing, Voice

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.

  Jacqueline Woodson

  I've Learned, Marrying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience.

  Robert Bly

  Academic, Form, Sociological

  Source: www.utne.com

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• Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

  Robert Bly

  Grief, Sociological

  Source: www.utne.com

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• When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.

  Jimmy Carter

  Writing, Self, Expression

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I feel like the reason I ended up becoming a playwright is because I never choose the right word. As a kid, my fantasy profession was to be a novelist. But the thing about writing prose - and maybe great prose writers don't feel this way - but I always felt it was about choosing words. I was always like, "I have to choose the perfect word." And then it would kill me, and I would choose the wrong word or I would choose too many perfect words - I wrote really purple prose.

  Annie Baker

  Writing, Kids, Purple

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.

  David Biespiel

  Thinking, Purpose, Argument

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Italian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.

  Jonathan W. Galassi

  Fun, Writing, Italian

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

  Katie Kitamura

  Running, Writing, Perception

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.

  Katie Kitamura

  Beautiful, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.

  Katie Kitamura

  Writing, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

  Katie Kitamura

  Distance, Reading, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm always looking for poetry's place in the prose. For that moment, let's say, that arrests time, or that sentence in which the musical matrix or trope, the sounds of the words arranged in a way that heightens perception, a tunefulness that more clearly defines and transfers the feeling I'm after to the reader.

  Jack Driscoll

  Feelings, Perception, Musical

  Source: therumpus.net

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• External realities - worlds of politics, economics, law, war, interpersonal and social relations - are part of prose fiction. Fiction also includes the realities of a character's interior language. Poetry can encompass the same realities, but in compressed, intensified language, which creates entirely different degrees of emotional force.

  Lawrence Joseph

  War, Reality, Emotional

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

  Ayana Mathis

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

  Miroslav Penkov

  Beautiful, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My method is the magpie's: I look for shiny things. That is, I look for concrete material details of daily life, and I look for vigorous prose, which is the only kind I can read for very long. That effectively bars a great deal of scholarly work, but I didn't feel its loss.

  Luc Sante

  Loss, Long, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

  Joshua Ferris

  World, Comedy, Charisma

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

  Nick Laird

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

  Nick Laird

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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