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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Artists
Artist
Today
Baudelaire
Hops
Hips

More quotes by 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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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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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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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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
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Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Jonathan Franzen
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.)
Jonathan Franzen
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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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