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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Plot
Step
Realize
Steps
Plate
Realizing
Liberating
Security
Plates
Council
Involves

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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.
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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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.
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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 world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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.
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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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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
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
Jonathan Franzen
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Jonathan Franzen
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
Jonathan Franzen