Prose Quotes

"He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form"

John C. Ransom

"Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading"

Jack Prelutsky, Poet

"All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children"

Paul Auster, Author

"I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose"

Jim Harrison, Writer

"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"

Malcolm Wilson, Politician

"No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment"

Ronald Harwood, Playwright

"There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement"

Robert Creeley, Poet

"If geography is prose, maps are iconography"

Lennart Meri, Statesman

"I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real"

Marguerite Young, Author

"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy"

Louis Kronenberger, Critic

"Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose"

Elia Kazan, Director

"Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time"

Christopher Fry, Playwright

"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose"

Mario Cuomo, Politician

"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language"

Elfriede Jelinek, Playwright

"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose"

Beverley Nichols, Writer

"People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do"

Leonard Alfred George Strong, Writer

"The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical"

William Shenstone, Poet

"Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment"

Story Musgrave, Astronaut

"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James"

David Antin, Poet

"I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary"

Jeff Vandermeer, Writer

"A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose"

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Author

"A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered"

Lee Strasberg, Director

"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it"

James Schuyler, Poet

"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"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal"

John C. Hawkes, Novelist

"I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose"

Neil Patrick Harris, Actor

"I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass"

Tracy Kidder, Author

"Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears"

F. L. Lucas, Critic

"So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear"

Thomas Bulfinch, Writer

"My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy"

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet

"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, Writer

"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, Author

"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"

Eyvind Johnson, Author

"Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists"

Donal Henahan

"From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose"

Mark Strand, Poet

"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!"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry"

Story Musgrave, Astronaut

"For me, prose walks, poetry dances"

James Broughton, Director

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