In true prose everything must be underlined.
Donald Westlake’s lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.
If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn’t have a handle on it. I didn’t go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative – readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don’t really know what you’re doing.
My writing could be the most beautiful or important piece of prose, but it means nothing if it’s boring, if people aren’t listening or reading. I think transporting someone, putting them in a story for a few hours, taking them out of their worlds, is what I always strive to do.
The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one’s prose style. That’s why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.
I’ve seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That’s the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren’t that terrific.
Woody Allen’s ‘The Complete Prose’ – It’s just the best selection of comic writing by one author. You know it’s good comedy when you get quite demoralised about yourself.
McCarthy’s prose in ‘Blood Meridian’ comes blazing from the Book of Revelation.
All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
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.
There’s bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there’s bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between.
Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.
Reviewers have called my books ‘novels in verse.’ I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means ‘room’ in Latin, and I wanted there to be ‘room’ – breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.
I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose – short pieces for my blog – because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!
Prose talks and poetry sings.
We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
I would never write a sentence that didn’t have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn’t leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn’t be prosaic.
I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.
If you are an autodidact, you probably do write more in the rhythm of speech rather than having learnt prose.
I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens – something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.
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.
I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.
It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
My early prose style – this is so embarrassing – was sort of a suburban, Presbyterian knockoff of Woody Allen.
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.
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.
As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.
If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that’s stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was… I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn’t require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing ‘Famished Road,’ which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.
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.
I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it’s as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it’s not that great.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you’re capable of and making your words symphonic.
When I’m writing comics, I’m also visualizing how the story will look on the page – not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.
