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
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.
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.
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value...
I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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.)
I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.
Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.