Quotes on Prose

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.

Every country in the world loved the folklore of the West--the music, the dress, the excitement, everything that was associated with the opening of a new territory. It took everybody out of their own little world. The cowboy lasted a hundred years, created more songs and prose and poetry than any other folk figure. The closest thing was the Japanese samurai. Now, I wonder who'll continue it.

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

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

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.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

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

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.