Top 84 Francine Prose Quotes
#1. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class
Francine Prose
#2. Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class - or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
Francine Prose
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang.
Francine Prose
#7. 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
#8. One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?
Francine Prose
#9. Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.
Francine Prose
#10. Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify
Francine Prose
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was "unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.
Francine Prose
#15. [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
#16. '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
#17. Maybe real love is being able to ask, Do I have greens in my teeth?
Francine Prose
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I'm out of the equation, an innocent bystander at the major love affair Joan is having with Joan
Francine Prose
#22. 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
#23. The chill lowered my defenses, and I caught a fever. A fever to understand.
Francine Prose
#24. 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
#25. When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.
Francine Prose
#26. Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.
Francine Prose
#27. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
Francine Prose
#28. A lot of girls who turn into something remarkable start off as irrepressible, confident and a handful.
Francine Prose
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.
Francine Prose
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page.
Francine Prose
#43. 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
#44. decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius.
Francine Prose
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Be patient. Life will give you what you need (to write your story).
Francine Prose
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone.
Francine Prose
#51. 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
#52. Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
Francine Prose
#53. 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
#54. Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.
Francine Prose
#55. 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
#56. Good writing should be grasped at once - in a second.
Francine Prose
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.
Francine Prose
#61. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
#62. People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.
Francine Prose
#63. 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
#64. Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt,
Francine Prose
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.
Francine Prose
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I work really long days and I work seven day weeks.
Francine Prose
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.
Francine Prose
#76. I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.
Francine Prose
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.
Francine Prose
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.
Francine Prose
#83. 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
#84. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
