Francine Prose Quotes & Sayings

Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify — Francine Prose

Isolated in the attic, Anne could only examine her own history and her own conscience, and try to locate the wellspring of her sadness and her rage. — Francine Prose

I went through college in the 1960s without having any idea that I was going to have to make a living. When I graduated in 1968 it was quite a shock to find out that there was a world out there and that it wasn't going to support me. — Francine Prose

convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understand so that she can live there. — Francine Prose

I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom. — Francine Prose

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it's essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it's surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted. — Francine Prose

Good writing should be grasped at once - in a second. — Francine Prose

We never believe we're beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way. — Francine Prose

People see everything through the lens of their obsessions. — Francine Prose

Every so often I'll hear writers say that there are other writers they would read if for no other reason than to marvel at the skill with which they can put together the sort of sentences that move us to read closely, to disassemble and reassemble them, much the way a mechanic might learn about an engine by taking it apart. — Francine Prose

Anne is remarkably restrained in calibrating the amount of fear she will admit into the diary. The air raids, the break-ins, and the brutality reported by the helpers and glimpsed from the window appear at regular intervals, so that the reader can never fully relax. — Francine Prose

Margot used to like describing men as 'my unhappy love affair.' But hadn't that presumed the existence of a happy love affair that made the others unimportant? What is unhappy is the only kind Margo ever has? — Francine Prose

A lot of girls who turn into something remarkable start off as irrepressible, confident and a handful. — Francine Prose

There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven't seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time. — Francine Prose

Though what is as sexy, as sweetly taboo as money? So secret, so unspeakable even among dear friends? How much did daddy leave you? How much did you get for that painting? How did you buy that fancy car with no visible means of employment? I have friends who tell me about every kinky sex act, the lies they tell, the crimes they commit, their intestinal complaints. But they shut up like bad shellfish when you ask what they paid for their house. — Francine Prose

When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. — Francine Prose

Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety. — Francine Prose

My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunch was delicious. — Francine Prose

I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia. — Francine Prose

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. — Francine Prose

You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males. — Francine Prose

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. — Francine Prose

But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate into kindness or even conscience. — Francine Prose

Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious, — Francine Prose

And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again. — Francine Prose

You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written. — Francine Prose

I'm out of the equation, an innocent bystander at the major love affair Joan is having with Joan — Francine Prose

But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have. — Francine Prose

I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter. — Francine Prose

AMONG THE DEMONS that taunt a writer before he can open a vein and write in his own blood are the devils that whisper: Are you brave enough to tell the truth? — Francine Prose

Be patient. Life will give you what you need (to write your story). — Francine Prose

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. — Francine Prose

Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang. — Francine Prose

Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page, — Francine Prose

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture. — Francine Prose

I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished. — Francine Prose

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus. — Francine Prose

Paris is an insomniac's heaven. There is always something to photograph, something hidden in the shadows. One can see so much more in the darkness than in the light of day. — Francine Prose

The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills. — Francine Prose

The truth is that grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought. — Francine Prose

You aim for what you want and if you don't get it, you don't get it, but if you don't aim, you don't get anything. — Francine Prose

Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. — Francine Prose

Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto. — Francine Prose

A woman would have to be crazy to marry, or even have sex with, a man who would prosecute every lover's quarrel like a criminal case — Francine Prose

Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt, — Francine Prose

She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she's right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats? — Francine Prose

In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone. — Francine Prose

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. — Francine Prose

Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing. — Francine Prose

It is the rarest of qualities: to feel something - anything - for someone beside yourself. And in my experience it is rarer still to have empathy for people you don't know. — Francine Prose

But beneath it all will run that Sicilian understanding that the underside of joy is grief, that the face of sacrifice and suffering is the dark mirror image of pleasure and enjoyment, that every moment of arrival is to be treasured and enjoyed in the full knowledge that it has brought us a moment closer to the moment of departure. — Francine Prose

she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: 'Is this just a joke or does she really mean it? — Francine Prose

Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet? — Francine Prose

Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro. — Francine Prose

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious. — Francine Prose

What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature. — Francine Prose

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees - this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward. — Francine Prose

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp. — Francine Prose

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. — Francine Prose

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction. — Francine Prose

I think of myself as someone with a kind of Tourette's. I cannot help saying the thing you're not supposed to say. — Francine Prose

Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content. — Francine Prose

She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier] - the spirit of the staircase - for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it. — Francine Prose

I'm in a rage all of the time. — Francine Prose

Is starting to happen between the two teenagers: It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips ... and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can't you look beyond this ridiculous chatter? — Francine Prose

Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class — Francine Prose

Something about the beauty of the library and how many books there were made me feel really eager to read, and I couldn't wait to get some free time so I could go back there and explore. — Francine Prose

But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response. — Francine Prose

What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel — Francine Prose

Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back. — Francine Prose

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies.
The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own - a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art. — Francine Prose

Maybe real love is being able to ask, Do I have greens in my teeth? — Francine Prose

We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan. — Francine Prose

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers
namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out
don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy
when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. — Francine Prose

Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let's imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than a beautiful man in a dress. — Francine Prose

Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page. — Francine Prose

Perhaps Aquinas's notably soft line on gluttony may have had something to do with the fact that the saint was said to have had what today we might call a weight problem. — Francine Prose

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. — Francine Prose

Of course, I've always read. I started when I was four years old and just didn't stop. I read all the time. — Francine Prose

I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider. — Francine Prose

Don't order boeuf bourguignon if you're a vegetarian, don't venture into the tearooms if you don't like ladies with lapdogs. Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert. — Francine Prose

You know who they wanted to play Rick?" Aaron asked.
I shook my head. Why was I so tense? Didn't Aaron's question prove that we were just a couple of old-movie fans swapping Hollywood trivia gossip?
"Ronald Reagan," said Aaron.
"The worst president ever," I said.
"You weren't born yet," he said.
"What difference does that make?" I said. — Francine Prose

decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius. — Francine Prose

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers. — Francine Prose

If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in. — Francine Prose

The ocean knew where her sailor was. We have seen him, said the waves. He is sleeping with us. You will never kiss his lips or feel the weight of his body again. — Francine Prose

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism. — Francine Prose

I see the eight of us within our "Secret Annex" as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by black, black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching dangers closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass. — Francine Prose

[It] began to seem amazing how often it was assumed that having a vagina automatically meant I was less intelligent, talented, capable, and interesting than the world's least interesting human being who happened to have a penis. — Francine Prose

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. — Francine Prose

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that ... transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary ... — Francine Prose

Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was "unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time. — Francine Prose

I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss. — Francine Prose

All of us have observed how often our erotic attractions reflect a mysterious but consistent taste, almost as if we were ordering a favorite dish — Francine Prose

One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower? — Francine Prose

Throughout her life, she behaved as if she had never heard anyone suggest that a woman couldn't do entirely as she pleased. — Francine Prose

Like, for example, sleeve length. Should he hide the tattoos? Or just wear a T-shirt and let "them" do the talking? If one picture's worth a thousand words, that's the first two thousand right there, two thousand minus the hi howareya nicetameetcha. — Francine Prose

Not all great writers may seem great to us, regardless of how often and how hard we try to see their virtues. I know, for example, that Trollope is considered to have been a brilliant novelist, but I've never quite understood what makes his fans so fervent. Still, our tastes change as we ourselves change and grow older, and perhaps in a few months or so Trollope will have become my new favorite writer. — Francine Prose

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time. — Francine Prose

If we want to write, it makes sense to read - and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would. — Francine Prose