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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Workplace
Connection
Connections
Internet
Fiction
Anyone
Writing
Good
Doubtful

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Jonathan Franzen
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
Jonathan Franzen
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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
Jonathan Franzen
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen
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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Jonathan Franzen
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
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The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
Jonathan Franzen
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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
Jonathan Franzen
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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