Tracy Kidder
Author
"Writing is revision. All prose responds to work."
Prose quotes
Prose
80 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist, Psychoanalyst
"When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life."
Barbara Kingsolver
Author, Biologist
"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."
W. Somerset Maugham
Novelist, Playwright
"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes..."
Nicholson Baker
Author
"Poetry is prose in slow motion."
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Topics related to Prose
Browse quotes that often appear alongside prose — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Prose quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"Eloquence is the poetry of prose."
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"All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose."
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"Poetry must be as well written as prose."
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"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
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"I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes."
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"I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen."
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"Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas."
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"Details are the Life of Prose."
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"I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose."
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"Clear prose indicates the absence of thought."
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"I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it."
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"I dwell in possibilities... a fairer house than prose."
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"All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book."
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"Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse."
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"Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose."
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"And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely."
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"According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse.""
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"The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence."
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"Good prose is written only face to face with poetry."
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"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."
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