Quote

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Jonathan Franzen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Uncle
Uncles
Bone
Bones
Healthy
Break

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Image
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for? I don't know. I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
Jonathan Franzen