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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Good
Depths
People
Reports
Novels
Produced
Depth
Deep
Isolate
Novel
Voluntarily
Find
Report

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
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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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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
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Jonathan Franzen
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
Jonathan Franzen
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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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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
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Jonathan Franzen
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
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Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
Jonathan Franzen
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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