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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
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Jonathan Earl Franzen
Matter
Happenings
Writing
Happening
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Beginning
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Irritated
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More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
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
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
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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
But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Jonathan Franzen
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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
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.
Jonathan Franzen
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
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
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Jonathan Franzen
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
Jonathan Franzen
The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
Jonathan Franzen
Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
Jonathan Franzen
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
[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
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen