Prose Quotes

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to...

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

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or...

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrativ...

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the dispo...

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices ...

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twist...

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ev...

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In pro...

I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd yo...

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorou...

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream o...

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a ...

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinar...

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be drag...

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms a...

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locom...

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . ....

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til...

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he i...

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later...

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or a...

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the ...

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the mois...

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only i...

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

…wisely mingled poetry and prose.

... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, al...

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of th...

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

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined...

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland...

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in...

Closer, it’s all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don’t be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am th...

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian harp of style,'...

He didn’t like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats f...

She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a...

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty yea...

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is n...

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and ...

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like imper...

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mou...

It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black...

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with...

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Demo...

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when i...

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own...

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea ...

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old...

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful...

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Br...

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which r...