Francine Prose Quotes

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Songwriting is a muscle. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book.

So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that's the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.