Francine Prose Quotes

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

I've been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'