'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.
So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my min...
I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscie...
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.
I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry…and I think it's nicer…' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed… 'to look at it through poetry.
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Samantha reminds me of the difference between what is illusion and what is real. I am reminded whenever I forget that we choose our truth and whether to embrace it or not.
I am a single note, a tone that peals in the wind. I am in the magic of the moment and then he returns, flowing toward me around the thick immense bark of the Sequoia.
The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Hal lain yang menghalangi produktivitas ialah pujian kritisi. Pujian itu bagai menantang saya, agar saya menulis yang nilainya sama dengan apa yang terbaik telah saya tulis selama ini.
The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.
We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is s...
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 poe...
Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerfu...
I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so...
It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kus...
