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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Imagination
Father
Looms
Figure
Large
Figures

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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.
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I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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.
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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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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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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.
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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
Jonathan Franzen
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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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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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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
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
Jonathan Franzen
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.
Jonathan Franzen