Prose Writing Quotes

Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose. ~ A.J. Flowers

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose. ~ Cyril Connolly

Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose. ~ Laurie Alberts

Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose. ~ Northrop Frye

I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing. ~ David Rees

Prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm. ~ Molly Peacock

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. ~ Haruki Murakami

my mother thinks i'm a living proof of cultural appropriation
but aren't i a foreigner in my own country
an outsider
but only on the inside ~ Xayaat Muhummed

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

Tell all the truth but tell it slant. ~ Emily Dickinson

Always be a poet, even in prose. ~ Charles Baudelaire

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic. ~ Robert Graves

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory. ~ Chris Ware

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose. ~ Winston Churchill

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career
my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker
she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

Details are the Life of Prose. ~ Jack Kerouac

Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's prose. ~ Jonathan Lethem

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. ~ Truman Capote

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is. ~ Anthony Horowitz

Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure. ~ Tom Robbins

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant. ~ William Monahan

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor. ~ Stephen King

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. ~ George Steiner

No matter what I write or speak about, it always has some connection to how our spiritual understanding impacts the world we live in. Whether I'm writing or teaching about nutrition, pilates, green living or meditation, all topics simmer down to self thought and intention. ~ Marianne Williamson

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical. ~ Jeanette Winterson

One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year. ~ Charlie Munger

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world. ~ Elizabeth Janeway

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories. ~ Madonna Ciccone

I admire writers who have the tenacity to write a blog, and I'm told by everyone that it's an important element in remaining visible in the online world. That said, I'm personally turned off by writers' blogs that do nothing but sing their own accomplishments. ~ David Starkey

Someone asked me if I would like to write a man on death row, be a pen pal, and I was like, sure. I volunteered. I had been in a place in my life - a relationship had ended; my parents were getting elderly - I was kind of adrift. The name that was given to me, just randomly, was Todd Willingham. And he wrote me a letter, and in this letter, he thanked me for writing him and [said that] if I would like to visit, he would put me on his visitor list ... I was just really struck by the letter from Todd. It was very polite; it was very kind. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Plus, we spend most of our time writing music. Most of the time is spent in the studio in my house. ~ Warren Cuccurullo

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth. ~ Mike Carey

The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization - but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities - both profound and trivial. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

I've been writing stories since I was a kid. I love writing stories. ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do. ~ Conor Oberst

Everywhere the poems open. ~ Mary Kinzie

For the most part, my characters don't talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself. ~ Sarah MacLean

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought. ~ Iris Murdoch

I think it's amazing to have one writer write every episode of a series. It's very rare, I think. You get a voice that continues. ~ Harry Treadaway

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal. ~ Salman Rushdie

It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am. ~ Vince Gill

A writer writes what other people only think. ~ Sol Stein

So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother's house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write. ~ George Lopez

I want to lay under the blanket of sky and laugh while the stars wink and we write our story. ~ A.D. Posey

He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the public judgement. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace. ~ Samuel Johnson

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open. ~ Amy Hempel

The writing about what you know thing was a huge one. Not worrying so much about what people think. Just writing for myself and the band is enough. ~ Luke Temple

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over. ~ Eric Brown

You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write it at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don't see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later, you wonder if it may not be all right after all. ~ Agatha Christie

The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive. ~ S.A. Tawks

It's not so much less pressure, it's less work, which is really exciting to me. I'm just personally looking forward to being able to spend a little more time doing different things, so that's really great. Jay and I are writing a book this year which is really fun and so yeah, I am very excited to spend less crazy 12-hour days on set. Those were taxing times. ~ Mark Duplass

I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself. ~ William Sleator

The writer must then see that once the protagonist lies, either to herself or to others-the lie will create its own repercussions, its own penalties and circumstances of revelation...A simple principle therefore is to create situation where the protagonist is forced to lie. ~ David Mura

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of 'Success. ~ James Baldwin