Francine Prose

Francine Prose (born April 1, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic.

Francine Prose in 2012

Quotes

• 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.
  • Reading Like a Writer, ch. 2, p. 15 (2006)

• 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.
  • Reading Like a Writer, ch. 3, p. 57 (2006) (referring to a passage in The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien)

• Love, we soon come to understand, too often provides the occasion for the misuses and abuse of power.
  • Introduction to Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories - An Anthology edited by Sandra Bark (2003)