Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in thei...
When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
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 find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in m...
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.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
You know, my dear, it's only doing you harm to write . After you have been writing strict, rhyming verse for about 10 years it will be time to venture on the free sort. At present it only encourages you to write prose not so good as your ordinary pro...
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.
And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
...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 stor...
All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
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.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
