Jonathan Franzen Quotes

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Jonathan Franzen

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1959

I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me.

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

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

Jonathan Franzen

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

Jonathan Franzen

I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist.

Jonathan Franzen

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

Jonathan Franzen

I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with.

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

I hate the word 'partner' so much.

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

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 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

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 used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

Jonathan Franzen