Prose Fiction Quotes

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

I enjoy going back and forth between plays and novels. It's like having a wife and a mistress. Books are the wife; plays, the mistress.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

One of the things I am most excited about personally is a five-issue anthology I put together, 'Legends of Red Sonja,' which is full of wonderful little short stories written exclusively by my favorite female writers of comics, prose, and gaming.

I don't do flash fiction.

I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I've tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal