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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
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
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen
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
There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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
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.
Jonathan Franzen
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
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
Jonathan Franzen
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
Jonathan Franzen
The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
Jonathan Franzen
Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
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
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
Jonathan Franzen
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
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