Prose Quotes

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire

Poetry, Words, Few

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway

Interior, Decoration, Baroque

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. Mencken

Poetry, Done, Enough

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell

Literature, Above, Novel

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

Good, True, Nothing

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf

Best, Poetry, True

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

Time, Together, Romance

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. Somerset Maugham

Step, Writer, Poet

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.
Moliere

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf

Mind, Body, Takes

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
J. K. Rowling

Poetry, Read, Touch

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Richard M. Nixon

Age, Poetry, Between

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster

Time, Money, Children

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Horace Walpole

Art, Poetry, Beautiful

In true prose everything must be underlined.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

True, Everything

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.
Camille Paglia

Poetry, Words, Down

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Best, Poetry, Words

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.
Joseph Conrad

Love, Human, Friendly

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody

Great, Writing, Fiction

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
Neil Gaiman

Beauty, Today, Writing

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
George William Curtis

Time, Poetry, Memory

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.
William E. Gladstone

Successful, Dangerous, Mediocrity

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Music, Reality, Die

I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.
Patti Smith

Written, Published

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov

Style, Count, Fancy

I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
Ben Okri

Change, Stress, Long

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

Beauty, Great, Respect

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
Haruki Murakami

Trying, Write, Days

It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami

Time, True, Simple

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