A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

W. Somerset Maugham

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W. Somerset Maugham
British - Novelist
January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

W. Somerset Maugham

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

W. Somerset Maugham

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

Nicholson Baker

Step aside? I step aside for nobeast, whether it be a hallowed hedgehog, an officious otter, a seasoned squirrel, a mutterin' mole or a befuddled badger!

Brian Jacques

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

Mary Karr

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Susan Sontag

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

Joseph Brodsky

There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.

Carol Birch

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Ernest Hemingway

My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.

Alex Lemon

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Tom Odell

A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

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