Francine Prose > Quotes

“I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.”
― Francine Prose, Goldengrove

“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, Goldengrove

“People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.”
― Francine Prose, Goldengrove

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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

“[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

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“[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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas – Witty, Transgressive Fiction About Americans Abroad and Historical Tragedy

“Saying good-bye to a city is harder than breaking up with a lover. The grief and regret are more piercing because they are more complex and unmixed, changing from corner to corner, with each passing vista, each shift of the light. Breaking up with a city is unclouded by the suspicion that after the affair ends, you'll learn something about the beloved you wished you never knew. The city is as it will remain: gorgeous, unattainable, going on without you as if you'd never existed. What pain and longing the lover feels as he bids farewell to a tendril of ivy, a flower stall, the local butcher. The charming café where he meant to have coffee but never did.”
― 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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

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

“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, The Turning

“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, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

“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, Goldengrove

“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, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“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, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

“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, My New American Life

“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

“So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improve
its quality but save your life in the process.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt,”
― Francine Prose, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932