Jonathan Franzen Quotes

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Jonathan Franzen

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1959

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Jonathan Franzen

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

Jonathan Franzen

I hate that word dysfunction.

Jonathan Franzen

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Jonathan Franzen

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

Jonathan Franzen

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

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

Manhattan is just all bank branches.

Jonathan Franzen

If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.

Jonathan Franzen

I know what paranoia is like. I know what it is like to worry about what people are saying about you and become obsessed with what people are saying about you.

Jonathan Franzen

Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me.

Jonathan Franzen

A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader.

Jonathan Franzen

I hate Whole Foods.

Jonathan Franzen

Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.

Jonathan Franzen

For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.

Jonathan Franzen

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we're not the measure of all things.

Jonathan Franzen

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of 'Freedom.' I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology.

Jonathan Franzen

I'm not a sexist.

Jonathan Franzen

I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women's work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It's like there's no way to make myself not male.

Jonathan Franzen

There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public - the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, 'Self-promote or die.' And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into.

Jonathan Franzen