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
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.
's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.
...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.
You're either reading a book or you're not.
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
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.