Pastoral Resources

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

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.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

If geography is prose, maps are iconography.