35+ Francine Prose Quotes On Education, Friendship And Insightful

Francine Prose is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. She is the author of more than twenty books, including the novels Blue Angel and A Changed Man. She has also written several works of nonfiction, including the best-selling Reading Like a Writer. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Francine Prose on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Francine Prose Quotes

1. Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.
2. Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
3. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
4. 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
5. A lot of girls who turn into something remarkable start off as irrepressible, confident and a handful.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.
• I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
• I work really long days and I work seven day weeks.
• There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.
• Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
• Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class
• Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.
• People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.

Francine Prose Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

'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

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

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

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 wasnt going to support me. — 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. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. — 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

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

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Francine Prose

1. Francine Prose's work emphasizes the importance of examining the world around us and questioning our assumptions.
2. She encourages readers to think critically and to find their own voices and perspectives, rather than blindly accepting what is presented to them.
3. Her writing also highlights the power of storytelling to connect us to our shared humanity and to inspire us to take action.