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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
-Gustave Flaubert
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A Good Sentence In Prose Should Be

Gustave Flaubert
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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Lines Should Prose

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Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. so don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. if you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what i mean.
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There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
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It's kind of like sentencing. a lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. wrong. in most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.
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The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. what we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. the fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. all along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. but now you find that it's the key.
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But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. but that's not a reason not to write love poetry. some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
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To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. prose needs to be built like a cathedral. there, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.
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All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which i had myself-though, thank god i had never committed them to paper-i think are nonsense. you write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. there are no rules or particular sensibilities. i don't believe in that at all anymore.
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Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. as anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
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