There were aspects of stardom I didn’t like, which were of no consequence, really, but the positive things far outweighed the negative. By the time I came to write ‘Setting Sons,’ I felt my writing was more like prose, set to music.
A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.
I won’t be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose – that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer’s time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.
In many ways, it’s easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.
Poetry and prose can start a revolution, break walls, and ideas can build nations.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve enjoyed.
A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn’t seem to be much difference in my own writing.
I’m a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare’s prose.
I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of ‘Constellation.’ A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
Not to make him blush, but any story illustrated by Mike Mignola does things that prose alone can’t accomplish. The illustrations create mood and atmosphere, drawing the reader more deeply into the story than words could do on their own.
Poetry isn’t just different from prose, it’s more important for the human species.
Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
I might have some sort of personality disorder. I might not have proper filters; it might be some kind of version of Asperger’s meets Tourettes meets prose.
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!
Don’t all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
‘Words and Music’ on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can’t cheat.
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
Of course, I have to consider that I’ve written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.
I read some older books when I worked at Barnes And Noble, like some of the American classics. I read a lot of Hemingway. I fell in love with Hemingway’s prose and with the way he wrote. I feel like he’s talking to me, like we’re in a bar and he’s not trying to jazz it up and sound smart, he’s just being him.
Prose is like this big block – you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I’m reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.
Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Despite the fact that he’s been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft’s work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.
Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer acquaintance – so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose… anything goes.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
I get asked a lot about writing for games and prose and film, and I will do some, but I can never see myself leaving comics. I love it too much.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
Marriage – a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I’d written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
I always like to break out and address the audience. In ‘The History Boys’, for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
Mandy Sutter’s ‘Bush Meat’ triumphs in its lean prose and true dialogue, in its disarming humour, in its evocation of a family divided by sexism and racism in 1960s Nigeria.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.
I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It’s very pleasurable for me.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
When we talk about novels, we don’t often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, ‘The Birds’ – it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.
