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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Way
Strangers
Time
Connect
Effective
Stranger
Particularly
Distance
Across
Fiction

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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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?
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
Jonathan Franzen
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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
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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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.
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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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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
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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