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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
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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
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Jonathan Earl Franzen
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More quotes by 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
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
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
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
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
Jonathan Franzen
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Jonathan Franzen
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
Jonathan Franzen
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Jonathan Franzen
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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
Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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.
Jonathan Franzen
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
Jonathan Franzen
Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
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?
Jonathan Franzen
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
