It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
I'm a better polemicist in prose.
I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. . . . the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.
I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.
Words are freeborn, and not the vassals of the gruff tyrants of prose to do their bidding only. They have the same right to dance and sing as the dewdrops have to sparkle and the stars to shine.
If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
OF writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.
Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.
I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception. . bringing into being a new experience Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.