1.
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
2.
Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
Tracy Kidder
3.
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
4.
When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
Sigmund Freud
5.
Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.
Barbara Kingsolver
7.
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
Vera Brittain
11.
Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
Marvin Bell
14.
Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.
Dick Schaap
16.
Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.
William Strunk, Jr.
17.
Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.
Jonathan Raban
19.
I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.
Jacqueline Woodson
20.
All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.
Moliere
21.
I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.
Khalil Gibran
23.
Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.
Jairam Ramesh
24.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
25.
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound
26.
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. Auden
27.
You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.
Sara Paretsky
28.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
29.
I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.
Andrei Tarkovsky
30.
The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.
Richard M. Nixon
31.
I wanted to be a writer. I still want to be a prose writer. I feel I am more temperamentally suited to that kind of life, although there are things I still want to do with music.
Juliana Hatfield
32.
I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
Gerald Durrell
35.
Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
Vita Sackville-West
36.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
Jim Harrison
37.
I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.
Alex Lemon
38.
The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose.
Alex Lemon
40.
If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.
Robert Breault
43.
EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.
Ambrose Bierce
45.
Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!
Moliere
46.
Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
47.
And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.
Robert Jay Lifton
48.
For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.
David Biespiel
49.
Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.
Wilson Follett
50.
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.
Jorge Luis Borges