Prose quotes
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I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.
-- Andrei Tarkovsky -
Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
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 -
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
-- Boris Pasternak -
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My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy
-- Carol Ann Duffy -
Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.
-- Charles Churchill -
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
-- David Antin -
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
-- David Hare -
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My medium is prose, not the novel.
-- David Shields -
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
-- Derek Walcott -
Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.
-- Dick Schaap -
Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
-- E. M. Forster -
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It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
-- Eugenio Montale -
Prose talks and poetry sings.
-- Franz Grillparzer -
Prose is walking; poetry is flying
-- Galway Kinnell -
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I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
-- Gerald Durrell -
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
-- Harold Bloom -
Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.
-- Jairam Ramesh -
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
-- James Broughton -
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And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
-- James Payn -
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
-- James Schuyler -
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
-- Jim Harrison -
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Nobody has time for your priceless prose. Get to the point.
-- Jim Michaels -
A page of good prose remains invincible.
-- John Cheever -
Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.
-- Jonathan Raban -
In true prose everything must be underlined.
-- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel -
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I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
-- Kevin Powers -
A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.
-- Mark Kurlansky -
Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
-- Marvin Bell -
David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .
-- Miriam Toews -
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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
-- Nicholson Baker -
Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
-- P. G. Wodehouse -
Prose proposes, verse reverses.
-- Richard Howard -
If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.
-- Robert Breault -
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The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge -
When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
-- Sigmund Freud -
The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.
-- Steve Grand -
I'm a better polemicist in prose.
-- Ted Rall -
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Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
-- Tracy Kidder -
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
-- Vera Brittain -
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
-- Virginia Woolf -
Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
-- Vita Sackville-West -
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Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
-- W. H. Auden -
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
-- W. Somerset Maugham -
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
-- William C. Bryant -
Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.
-- William Strunk, Jr. -
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Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.
-- Wilson Follett -
I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.
-- Alex Lemon -
The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose.
-- Alex Lemon -
I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
-- Gemma Files -
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I like the way the prose and poetry interact.
-- Rachel Zucker -
When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.
-- Miroslav Penkov -
To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
-- Pattiann Rogers -
For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.
-- David Biespiel -
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I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.
-- Ron Padgett
