But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.
Francine ProseIf things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.
Francine ProseI know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.
Francine ProseWith so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact itโs essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but itโs surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Francine ProseTo be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your ownโa difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.
Francine ProseSo perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.
Francine Prose