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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Everything
Move
Luster
Kind
Bits
Weirdness
Life
Head
Reasonably
Though
Velvet
Moving
Perspective
Experience
Looked
Littles
Saws
Little
Normal
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
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
So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
Jonathan Franzen
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
Jonathan Franzen
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
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?
Jonathan Franzen
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.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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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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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Jonathan Franzen
[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Jonathan Franzen
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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
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
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Jonathan Franzen
