Jonathan Franzen Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Jonathan Franzen quote about:
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“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?”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“If you look at the New Testament, it's a gospel of love. Yes, there's talk of judgement and there's talk of heaven and there's talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn't seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“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.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“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.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“You're either reading a book or you're not.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“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...”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“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.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.”
-- Jonathan Franzen -
“Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.”
-- Jonathan Franzen
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