Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Earl Franzenis an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedomgarnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1959
CountryUnited States of America
Jonathan Franzen quotes about
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.
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.
Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose,
If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.
The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.