Quote

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

Jonathan Franzen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Verbs
Seldom
Interesting
Writing

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Image
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
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.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen