I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.
– Raymond Carver
Tag: prose
Quotable 359
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 263
Don’t overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced.
– Sarah Waters
Quotable 251
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 207
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
– Barbara W. Tuchman