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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Corrections
Dead
Problem
Never

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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.
Jonathan Franzen
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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
Jonathan Franzen
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Jonathan Franzen
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
Jonathan Franzen
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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 voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
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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