Quote

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

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
Sitting
Stills
Still
Chasing
Stillness

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Image
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Popularity has become its own justification.
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
So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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
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
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
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
Image
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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
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.)
Jonathan Franzen
Image
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Jonathan Franzen
Image
[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