Prose Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Prose

Prose Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Prose quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music. — Rob Roberge

Nowhere hidden has ever turned away a goodheart guest. — Mikl Paul

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal. — Samuel R. Delany

Later when they would mention, they would say, and everyone would know, but not nearly as well as they meant. — Mikl Paul

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. — Francine Prose

A page of good prose remains invincible. — John Cheever

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well. — Dave Morris

With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation. — Bret Easton Ellis

Solace of Silence
surreal synapses
of a melancholy drone
a dream per chance
she dared not be alone ... — Muse

She's like poetry. Like prose and love letters and lyrics, cascading down the center of a page. — Colleen Hoover

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose. — Steve Grand

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality. — Rick Moody

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that. — Alexis Dziena

Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk,
when you could not even walk. — Akash Lakhotia

Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart. — Lauren DeStefano

The man on the ceiling casts shadows of flesh, and sometimes the shadows take on lives of their own. — Melanie Tem

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. — Kevin Powers

My heavens! I've been talking prose for the last forty years without knowing it. — Moliere

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever. — May Sarton

the hope is small
but it is everything. — AVA.

I haven't been very impressed lately.
By people,
or places,
or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind. — Charlotte Eriksson

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk — Herbert Gold

Details are the Life of Prose. — Jack Kerouac

I don't need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore,
like I always thought I would. — Charlotte Eriksson

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone. — Chris Howard

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous. — Gustave Flaubert

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. — Virginia Woolf

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable — Per Brinch Hansen

The moon hung heavy over the lake like an overripe orange, trickling its golden stream of light across inky depths. — Julie Lessman

Eloquence is the poetry of prose. — William C. Bryant

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness. — Anthony Doerr

I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative. — Rigoberto Gonzalez

decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius. — Francine Prose

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again. — Lauren DeStefano

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved. — George Saunders

you came in slowly like the fog
and consumed me. — AVA.

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. — Raymond Chandler

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time. — Vita Sackville-West

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul. — Oscar Wilde

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories. — Haruki Murakami

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added. — Helen Vendler

Writing a play, you have to retain it all in your head - you need more time. With prose, you can snatch an hour here, an hour there. — Nell Leyshon

And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other. — Danabelle Gutierrez

There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven't seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time. — Francine Prose

A Coy Aversion

...a flutter
too shy
to be seen... — Muse

Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate — Henry James

things keep falling in and out of place.
this is the universe's way of taking care of me. — AVA.

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose. — Neil Simon

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries. — Eugenio Montale

Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity. — T. S. Eliot

The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul. — Ondjaki

Metaphor is a slippery eel, if it wasn't for its shock I'd stick to the easy catch of prose. — David Joseph Cribbin

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

If it doesn't work horizontally as prose ... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry. — Robert Breault

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes. — Cole Porter

It ain't so easy writing about nothin — Patti Smith

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. — China Mieville

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. — Francine Prose

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ... — Miriam Toews

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't. — John M. Ford

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world
it is like operetta in prose
all so flowery and heavenlike. — Marsden Hartley

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. — Mary Karr

Cradle of Solitude
For we know not why our tribulations
are given as such
our fragile forms
created from the dust ... — Muse

Be patient. Life will give you what you need (to write your story). — Francine Prose

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. — Samuel McChord Crothers

Why can't prose be poetic? — Kevin Focke

Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto. — Francine Prose

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose. — Basil Bunting

i act harder than i am.
i am softer than i look. — AVA.

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture. — Francine Prose

..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get. — Meraaqi

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.

love yourself first,
and you will always be in love. — AVA.

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art. — Paul Valery

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem. — Pattiann Rogers

The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

i do not know how to live tepidly.
i was never built to fit in.
i live by my soul
and my soul is insane. — AVA.

I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose. — Chang-rae Lee

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge. — Simon Armitage

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux. — Franz Wright

If you think while you write, you will enjoy it more and your prose will be more muscular and engaging. — Elise Hancock

Around everything that is perfected, the unfinished ascends and intensifies. — Rainer Maria Rilke

everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay. — AVA.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose. — Jorge Luis Borges

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. — Lynn Abbey

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. — Sylvia Plath

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. — Voltaire

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip. — Eugenio Montale

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,
trying to say-
for the thousandth time-
what's easier done than said. — Piet Hein

What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance. — Charlotte Eriksson

Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content. — Francine Prose

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. — John Updike

The rhythm of fraught footsteps and fervent heartbeat orchestrated a symphony of anticipation and dread. — Brian A. McBride

A book that bores me to tears is a book that neglects character building and quality of prose. — Kristin Cashore

Prose talks and poetry sings. — Franz Grillparzer

Tighten your prose so the story flows. — Anna Dobritt

Hyperbole comes easily to us. To find measured prose and even tone in the midst of aching grief was tough. — Maithili Rao

Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class — Francine Prose

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. — Gabrielle Zevin