Vera Brittain Quotes

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

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.

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 believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

Knut Hamsun's writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

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

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.