Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
— Cole Porter
Off-limits Prose Writing quotations
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble;
he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director.
... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow.
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers.
Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose.
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment.
Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
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.
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.
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.
A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.
Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.
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.
Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families.
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
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.
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.
First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
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.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
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.