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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
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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Reach
Inward
Reader
Readers
United
Print
Ever
Substance
Need
Loneliness
Needs
Pursuit
Way
Solitude
Evanescence
Time
Writers
Increasing
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
Jonathan Franzen
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
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.
Jonathan Franzen
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
Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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
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.
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
How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
Jonathan Franzen
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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
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
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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.
Jonathan Franzen
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
Jonathan Franzen
