Francine Prose Quotes

32 quotes in 618 categories

• All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
• '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…
• 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…
• Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
• 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…
• Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class
• 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.
• So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they…
• Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
• 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…
• There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.
• 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…
• 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…
• People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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