“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
“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
“For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose”
Sylvia Plath
“Out of writing all those books, people were looking for Waldo in his prose. His books are ones that will be in print for a long time. He'll be sadly missed as a teacher and a friend by so many.”
Doug Brinkley
“I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.”
Kazuo Ishiguro
“I certainly love writing books. I've always written short stories and novels, because in prose, you get all the control. You don't have to take it to a theater and see it changed to get it produced.”
Maria Headley
“Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”
Beverley Nichols
