Jonathan Franzen Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was always interested in the kind of history they didn't teach you in school.
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The bottom line is, when you're in the Senate, you have more of a voice in the beginning than a new House member.
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The true character of ministry is a servants heart.
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Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.
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I changed that system in Florida when I was the Speaker of the House - I was the Minority Leader; I saw for 16 years the way a power system works.
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Are you used to entertaining everyone with your tales of drama and conflict? Do you get attention and feel important every time you complain about how awful this man is? Stop settling for attention for the negative stuff in your life.
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Dance has always been my number one. I started when I was seven years old and I've had the opportunity to work with some really amazing artists.
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Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.
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To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
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Movies have been my way to get out of my backyard. I'm trying to let people know that movies change people's lives.
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To destroy is always the first step in any creation.
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I would love to work with Matt Damon.
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I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I'd fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once.
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There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
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Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.
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A well-designed 401(k) plan is an enormous competitive edge when recruiting and retaining employees.
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I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment.
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You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts – in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.
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I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.
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For me, it's important to concentrate to the present and leave the past.
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For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.
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I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
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I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
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The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
