Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Change
Self
Evident
Things
Happen
Life
Dies
People
Happens
Ends
Certain
Seems

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Image
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
Image
I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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
The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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
But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
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