Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H. L. Mencken
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell
Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. — Mario Vargas Llosa
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices. — Amos Oz
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry. — William Golding
Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is. — Dick Guindon
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it. — Ernest Hemingway
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. — Dorothy Parker
Prose Writing Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
Prose Quotes
If geography is prose, maps are iconography. — Lennart Meri
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor. — Derek Walcott
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. — Ernest Hemingway
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. — Virginia Woolf
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. — Henry Purcell
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries. — Eugenio Montale
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
Poetry And Prose Quotes
You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry. — Satya Nadella
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. — Christopher Fry
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. — Lafcadio Hearn
Write hard and clear about what hurts.
The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema. — Derek Jarman
I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry. — Christopher Hitchens
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. — Voltaire
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. — W. Somerset Maugham
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart. — Rabindranath Tagore
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. — Walter Savage Landor
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation. — Clive James
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 — Bill Vaughan
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. — Ernest Hemingway
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. — Cole Porter
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. — Victor Hugo
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. — Barbara Tuchman
The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose. — Paul Laurence Dunbar
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. — Ben Bova
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. — William Zinsser
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. — Ernest Hemingway
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
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. — Robert Frost
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. — Bruce Springsteen
Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. — Elmore Leonard
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. — Paul McCartney
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. — J. D. Salinger
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. — George Orwell
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. — Will Self
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. — Parker J. Palmer
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. — Quentin Tarantino
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. — Tom Johnson
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose. — Northrop Frye
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. — Sylvia Plath
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose. — Jerry B. Jenkins
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
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. — Ernest Hemingway
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
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose. — Jeffery Deaver
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. — Eugenio Montale
The very term "turning pages" suggests nonstop action. But I am all about character and beautiful writing. I eat that up like popcorn. Whether a book is action-packed or not, all I need are well-written prose and quirky, fabulous characters to keep me going. — Elizabeth Wein
Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings. — Sidney Hook
Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. — William Shenstone
I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up. — John Legend
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
Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements. — Amit Ray
If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall. — Steven Morrissey
one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose. — Lucy Maud Montgomery
Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. — Herbert Read
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. — George Orwell
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of prose writing quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about prose writing to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of prose writing quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
