Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.
Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.
Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .
Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.
What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception. . bringing into being a new experience Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity.
Prose proposes, verse reverses.
Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed. . . ," instead of, "I believe. . . "), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.
All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.
James Baldwin had an unrivaled understanding of politics and history and, above all, the human condition. His prose is laser sharp. His onslaught is massive and leaves no room for response. Every sentence is an immediate cocked grenade. You pick it up, then realize that it is too late. It just blows up in your face. And yet he still managed to stay human, tender, accessible.
A page of good prose remains invincible.
My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, "You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning. "
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.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions. . . . Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers. . . .
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.