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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Culture
Novelists
Find
Consists
Time
Readers
Crisis
Reader
Novelist
Less
Impossibility
Read
Engaging
Energy
Engage

More quotes by 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 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.
Jonathan Franzen
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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[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
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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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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
Jonathan Franzen
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen
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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
Jonathan Franzen
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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
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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Jonathan Franzen
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
Jonathan Franzen
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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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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Jonathan Franzen
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
Jonathan Franzen
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Jonathan Franzen
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Jonathan Franzen