prose Quotes

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

I feel like I\'m a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It\'s recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it\'s pre-Victorian and so doesn\'t have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don\'t know what the hell is going on, then it\'s kind of boring.

Quotations are the needle by which prose, poetry, and drama are stitched together in the reader\'s perception. (Anatoly Yurkin)

Aphorism is a verbal acrobatics over the ocean of fiction, in which toothy envious and opponents lurk. (Anatoly Yurkin)

Deep fiction. (Anatoly Yurkin)

Genesis is fiction written by guest workers. (Anatoly Yurkin)

Prose talks and poetry sings.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

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

By the time I was doing \'Kill Bill,\' it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in \'Kill Bill,\' I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

With everything I've done from \'Jackie Brown\' on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right. And consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and got to \'Kill Bill\' volume 1 and 2.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

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

Poetry is a language for when you can't quite write prose about something, you can't quite say it, but if you do a poem, it kind of gets to the point.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

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.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.