Francine Prose

Sourced

• 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)