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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. -- Ernest Hemingway
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. -- Walter Savage Landor
Prose proposes, verse reverses. -- Richard Howard
Prose talks and poetry sings. -- Franz Grillparzer
Details are the Life of Prose. -- Jack Kerouac
Prose is walking; poetry is flying -- Galway Kinnell
Prose is like hair; it shines with combing. -- Gustave Flaubert
Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink. -- Franz Grillparzer
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Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely. -- Ted Hughes
Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept -- T. E. Hulme
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. -- Joyce Carol Oates
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat. -- Robert Graves
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work. -- Gunter Grass
Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it. -- William Beckett
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging. -- Mary Karr
My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law. -- Robert Schumann
Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out. -- Marvin Bell
Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. -- Virginia Woolf
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult. -- Walter Pater
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Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time. -- Vita Sackville-West
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. -- Robert Morgan
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. -- Mary Karr
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. -- John Updike
Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose. -- Basil Bunting
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
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. -- Jeremy Bentham
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. -- William Carlos Williams
Prose pretends to be straightforward in its application to the truth, but truth itself is a dissembler. Poetry, much more honest, knows the deception can't be overcome. -- Laurence Overmire
All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose. -- James Agate
Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window. -- Mu Xin
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. -- Walter Benjamin
I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular. -- Blaise Cendrars
What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters. -- Matthea Harvey
Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin. -- William Safire
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls. -- John Fowles
Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music! -- Lori R. Lopez
Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something. -- Bill Callahan
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. -- Ernest Hemingway
Always be a poet, even in prose. -- Charles Baudelaire
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. -- Mario Cuomo
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. -- Paul Valery
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane. -- George Orwell
Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion. -- E. M. Forster
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. -- W. Somerset Maugham
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves. -- Lewis Carroll
Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it. -- Moliere
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. -- Virginia Woolf
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. -- Voltaire
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose. -- Beverley Nichols
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
The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song. -- Edmund Clarence Stedman
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
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer -- E. M. Forster
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. -- Ernest Hemingway
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. -- Samuel McChord Crothers
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp. -- Brian D. McLaren
If geography is prose, maps are iconography. -- Lennart Meri
Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose. -- Sholom Aleichem
Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist. -- Tommy Lee Jones
'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose. -- Chuck Palahniuk
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. -- James Schuyler
And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny. -- Cassandra Clare
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
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose. -- Philip Pullman
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. -- Shelby Foote
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. -- Jesmyn Ward
I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that. -- H. G. Bissinger
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice. -- Joyce Carol Oates
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
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
There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement. -- Robert Creeley
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. -- Maya Angelou
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 Kushiel series. -- Jacqueline Carey
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
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
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 my poetry and prose, or I missed everything. -- Maya Angelou
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
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 so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty. -- James Fenton
In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. -- Maya Angelou
I'm a better polemicist in prose. -- Ted Rall
Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose. -- Dick Schaap
For me, prose walks, poetry dances. -- James Broughton
Eloquence is the poetry of prose. -- William C. Bryant
Poetry is prose in slow motion. -- Nicholson Baker
Beer is prose. Wine is poetry. -- Jennifer Rosen
My medium is prose, not the novel. -- David Shields
Clear prose indicates the absence of thought. -- Marshall McLuhan
Poetry is prose, bent out of shape. -- J. Patrick Lewis
A page of good prose remains invincible. -- John Cheever
If geography is prose, maps are iconography, -- Lennart Meri
In true prose everything must be underlined. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Writing is revision. All prose responds to work. -- Tracy Kidder
Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov. -- David Lipsky
Poetry must be as well written as prose. -- Ezra Pound
Less is more, in prose as in architecture. -- Donald Hall
I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing. -- David Rees
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, -- Derek Walcott
Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose. -- Winston Churchill
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose. -- W. H. Auden
Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose. -- Eugenio Montale
Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose. -- Robert Galbraith
I like the way the prose and poetry interact. -- Rachel Zucker
My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy -- Carol Ann Duffy
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose. -- Jim Harrison
My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy. -- Carol Ann Duffy
Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose. -- Francesca Lia Block
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. -- Harold Bloom
Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose. -- Jairam Ramesh
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. -- George Saintsbury
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. -- Matthea Harvey
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. -- Ian Mcewan
Nobody has time for your priceless prose. Get to the point. -- Jim Michaels

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