Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.

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.

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.

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?

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

I am struck most strongly by her introspection, solitude, perfect self-awareness and sense of purpose…The beauty and truth of her words have transcended the limits placed upon her life by the darkness of human nature.

Love is strange" was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.

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.

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

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.

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.

The chill lowered my defenses, and I caught a fever. A fever to understand.

A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez's novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.

Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the desire to finally kiss the crooked lower lip of an elementary school principal or the boy on whom we had an unrequited childhood crush.