Jonathan Franzen Quotes

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Jonathan Franzen

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Quotes to Explore

• I'm very content.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Very
  • Content

• I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.

  

  Yo-Yo Ma
  • Up
  • World
  • Great

• I feel like if you flip through my Instagram, you'll kind of see the same angles and poses every time. That's the trick to having people love your Instagram selfies. It's all about your angles.

  

  Hailey Bieber
  • People
  • Time
  • Like

• I'm really good at making teen angst romantic. I'm really good at dealing with heartbreak and things like that and making it into this whole experience. But there's no way to make someone-on-the-Internet-said-something-mean-about-me into romantic angst where you can listen to music and cry or whatever.

  

  Tavi Gevinson
  • Good
  • Music
  • Experience

• I'm from outside Philadelphia, a town called Wayne, which is, like, 25 minutes northwest.

  

  Abbi Jacobson
  • Like
  • Outside
  • Philadelphia

• A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Crazy
  • Ignorant
  • Newspaper

• Both villains and heroes need to have a steadfast belief in themselves.

  

  Jack Gleeson
  • Need
  • Belief
  • Heroes

• Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.

  

  Hans Rosling
  • Political
  • Numbers
  • Data

• Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.

  

  Yuna
  • Song
  • Always
  • Egypt

• I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

  

  Tanith Lee
  • World
  • Feel
  • Belong

• When I go home, I play with my baby dolls and strollers and diaper bags, and play with my sisters.

  

  Dakota Fanning
  • Home
  • Play
  • Baby

• The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it's a tightrope. It's a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

  

  D'Angelo
  • Music
  • Trying
  • Art

• If I do something, it's always 90% obvious and 10% unknown.

  

  Felix Baumgartner
  • Always
  • Unknown
  • Obvious

• I think what happens is you write how you grew up. And I was born on the prairie, and so everything is kind of spare on the prairie. And so I'm just used to writing in that way. 'Sarah, Plain and Tall' was that way. And most of my fiction is. I like writing small pieces. Somehow it just suits me.

  

  Patricia MacLachlan
  • Writing
  • Way
  • Born

• It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

  

  Bayard Taylor
  • People
  • Time
  • Different

• To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering.

  

  Ingrid Newkirk
  • World
  • Suffering
  • Oppression

• Cinnamon bites and kisses simultaneously.

  

  Vanna Bonta
  • Kisses
  • Simultaneously

• While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

  

  Samuel Johnson
  • Grief

• A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.

  

  Aldous Huxley
  • World
  • Different
  • Character

• Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.

  

  Nancy Gibbs
  • Kind
  • Red
  • Dirty

• It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

  

  Edward Zwick
  • Time
  • God

• The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.

  

  Pier Paolo Pasolini
  • Life
  • Work
  • Mark

• I think I deliberately sold out a couple of times. I picked the songs that I thought would do well in the marketplace, even though I didn't really love the song.

  

  Eric Clapton Blind Faith
  • Thinking
  • Song
  • Couple

• I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

  

  Jonathan Franzen