John Crowe Ransom Quotes

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

I assumed just from being around, all these years, that people would immediately glom on to, Well, it's a departure, and it's a dystopian kind of thing, and that's natural, of course. But it's surprised me - not even surprised me, but it's pleased me - how much people have been responding to the way the book was written.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.