Francine Prose Quotes

I write about my life and my own experience, but I also write about things that I have no knowledge of whatsoever.

I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.

I read widely - for news, the arts, science, for entertainment, and the value of being informed - and, as a fiction writer, I can't help transposing what I learn into the scenario for a novel or story.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.

I am a writer and editor with a passion for true storytelling. To me, science matters, research matters and knowledge matters, whatever the field.

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.

I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.