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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Story
Aliveness
Pain
Weirdly
Stories
Bringing
Also
Larger
Welcome
Extraordinary
News
Quite
Restorative
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
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
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Jonathan Franzen
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Jonathan Franzen
To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
Jonathan Franzen
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
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
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen
Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
Jonathan Franzen
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
Jonathan Franzen
I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
Jonathan Franzen
This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
Jonathan Franzen
Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
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
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
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
Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
Jonathan Franzen
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
Jonathan Franzen
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Jonathan Franzen
