111 Quotes by Francine Prose

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.

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

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.

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.

But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.

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

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.

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.

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.