Top 222 Prose Quotes

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ – I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the ’40s and ’50s.

I’ve always been fond of Tim Drake/Robin. I suppose it’s the YA writer in me. I enjoy the intensity of young, smart heroes. I’d love to write him in either graphic or prose form.

I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I don’t really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.

And write what you love – don’t feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word ‘prose,’ or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

I can’t imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it’s of no importance.

I’ve never written poetry. I’m not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can’t waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything’s got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it’s physical. You’re also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn’t exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

You can put things in prose and understand them one way, and then there’s understanding it by knowing how it feels. Things aren’t real until you can feel that, until you can empathize with them. That’s what protagonists do in books.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.

I’m a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose – I don’t do succinct well, so I’m in awe of writers who do.

I suppose people might consider me a ‘loose’ reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

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

Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

Henry James’s later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it’s transcribed into written prose.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can’t express. It’s good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

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.

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.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

‘M Train’ will take you in and out of dreamscapes and reality and remembrances with prose so spare and matter-of-fact that it delivers a much bigger emotional punch. Patti Smith doesn’t need to embellish; she just tells her stories… and her stories are incredible.

I am not a great fan of serious, heavy writing. I prefer simple, short sentences, light on prose.

The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

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

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

Read a lot – poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.

I’ve written a lot of prose. I just haven’t published it.

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

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.

If there’s anything I’m keen to get better at in my writing, then it’s the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

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.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line – to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don’t know his work pick up a book and experience this writer’s zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don’t think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you’re literally not dependent on anybody.

My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That’s a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

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.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I’m not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

For every Book of Job, there’s a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.