Jonathan Franzen Quotes

• Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

  Jonathan Franzen

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• Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

  Jonathan Franzen

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• It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

  Jonathan Franzen

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• You’re either reading a book or you’re not.

  Jonathan Franzen

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  The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.

  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

• We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

  Jonathan Franzen

• 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

• The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

  Jonathan Franzen

• The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

  Jonathan Franzen

• ‘s one of the perversities of the age: I’m embarrassed by its success, but I’m happy it’s selling.

  Jonathan Franzen

• 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

• It’s not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It’s nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it.

  Jonathan Franzen

• It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

  Jonathan Franzen

• If you’re interested in how people behave, if you’re interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it’s very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

  Jonathan Franzen

• I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then… it’s sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that’s fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

  Jonathan Franzen

• I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else’s name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

  Jonathan Franzen

• I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

  Jonathan Franzen

• 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

• I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

  Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen (27)

Birth:	17th August, 1959
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1949 - Robin Gibb
• 1889 - B. Carroll Reece
• 1944 - Steve Carlton
• 1962 - Ralph Fiennes
• 1944 - Mary Archer

Deaths

• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 1943 - Beatrix Potter
• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton