Jonathan Franzen Quotes
It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Quotes to Explore
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I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
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Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
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I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.
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Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
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Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.
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We had to go all through the night thinking that our baby was dead. When God showed him to us, he wasn't dead, he was sucking his thumb. God had him safe and sound. He is a miracle. He is so healthy, so perfect, and God has really, really blessed us.
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Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
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Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.
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Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
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I really wanted to work and become independent.
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A lot of technologies in the world were unusual in the beginning, and became standard. That's the beauty of bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovations.
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When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
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Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.
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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
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Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
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Spielberg is our hero. For him to make a nod to 'Godzilla' just before we make our movie is like getting the king to acknowledge you at dinner.
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Because homecoming came first, and there was the homecoming court. The five guys on homecoming court were disqualified from being in the prom court. So being prom king was being sixth most popular.
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You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
