Quote

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

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
Take
Multitask
Really
Novel
Things
Reading
Point
Place
Stills
Still
Book

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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
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.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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?
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
Jonathan Franzen