Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.
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.
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.
Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.
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.
I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.
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 know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
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.
Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed? ... Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.
I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.
Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
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.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate.
Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.
Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
