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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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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
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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
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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
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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 think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Jonathan Franzen
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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
Jonathan Franzen
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
Jonathan Franzen
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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
Jonathan Franzen
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.)
Jonathan Franzen
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
Jonathan Franzen
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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