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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Stories
Mission
Way
Missions
Think
Gotten
Thinking
Writer
Media
Stuff
Shallow
Tell
Compelling
Cannot
Talked

More quotes by 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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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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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.
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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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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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
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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
Jonathan Franzen
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
Jonathan Franzen
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Jonathan Franzen
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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
Jonathan Franzen