Quotes from Francine Prose

He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it's obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire.

Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was "unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.

In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone.

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.

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.

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 But no longer unpublished.

Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant—the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.

words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

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.

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.

Along with preadolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there:

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?

Books are not cake—you and I can devour the same book, and there it remains for us and others to devour all over again.

The most important things, I told them, were observation and consciousness. Keep your eyes open, see clearly, think about what you see, ask yourself what it means.

Stories aren't about things. Stories are things. Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.

there were many occasions on which I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote, ten days for War and Peace, courses designed to produce college graduates who could say they'd read the classics. By then I knew enough to regret reading those books that way. And I promised myself that I would revisit them as soon as I could give them the time and attention they deserved.

end of this painful story: a man possessed and maddened enough to write such letters, and a bereaved father receiving them, until at last he reached the point at which he refused to read any more.

Little by little we surfaced from the dark gluey depths of that summer, bobbing into the blinding light we had to relearn how to breathe

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.

She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she's right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats?

Albanians don't get dyslexia. It's a disease Americans invented so they won't have to admit their kids are retarded.

She'd written a book, and I hadn't, even if her novel was worse than anything I would have written.

Reading can show you how capacious and stretchy fiction is, how much it can accommodate, and how far it has expanded beyond the straight and narrow path from point A to point B.

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.