Top 70 Francine Prose Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class.”

— Francine Prose

2. “Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.”

— Francine Prose

3. “There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.”

— Francine Prose

4. “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.”

— Francine Prose

5. “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

6. “I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.”

— Francine Prose

7. “Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.”

— Francine Prose

8. “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

9. “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

10. “The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills.”

— Francine Prose

11. “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.”

— Francine Prose

12. “Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.”

— Francine Prose

13. “If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.”

— Francine Prose

14. “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.”

— Francine Prose

15. “Don’t order boeuf bourguignon if you’re a vegetarian, don’t venture into the tearooms if you don’t like ladies with lapdogs. Don’t come to Paris if you’re planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.”

— Francine Prose

16. “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.”

— Francine Prose

17. “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

18. “I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.”

— Francine Prose

19. “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

20. “All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another.”

— Francine Prose

21. “People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.”

— Francine Prose

22. “Love is blooming on the riverbanks, in the alleys of Montmartre. Park benches exist for lovers exhausted by excessive kissing.”

— Francine Prose

23. “Love is strange” was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.”

— Francine Prose

24. “Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.”

— Francine Prose

25. “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.”

— Francine Prose

26. “It is the rarest of qualities: to feel something – anything – for someone beside yourself. And in my experience it is rarer still to have empathy for people you don’t know.”

— Francine Prose

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

— Francine Prose

28. “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.”

— Francine Prose

29. “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.”

— Francine Prose

30. “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

31. “Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page.”

— Francine Prose

32. “The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.”

— Francine Prose

33. “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.”

— Francine Prose

34. “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.”

— Francine Prose

35. “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

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

— Francine Prose

37. “Don’t come to Paris if you’re planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.”

— Francine Prose

38. “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

39. “Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.”

— Francine Prose

40. “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

41. “I work really long days and I work seven day weeks.”

— Francine Prose

42. “In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.”

— Francine Prose

43. “I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.”

— Francine Prose

44. “I’m out of the equation, an innocent bystander at the major love affair Joan is having with Joan.”

— Francine Prose

45. “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.”

— Francine Prose

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

— Francine Prose

47. “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.”

— Francine Prose

48. “I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.”

— Francine Prose

49. “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.”

— Francine Prose

50. “I wanted to know what he thought about my loving a man whose bills were being paid by another woman.”

— Francine Prose