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

• 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

• I do believe in 'forever' in terms of relationships. There's something really amazing about being with someone for a long time and really knowing each other in that way. They end up becoming your closest friend.

  

  Albert Hammond, Jr.
  • Up
  • Time
  • Believe

• I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.

  

  Brad Pitt
  • Irish

• The whole life of Christians ought to be an exercise of piety, since they are called to sanctification. It is the office of the law to remind them of their duty and thereby to excite them to the pursuit of holiness and integrity. But when their consciences are solicitous how God may be propitiated, what answer they shall make, and on what they shall rest their confidence, if called to his tribunal, there must then be no consideration of the requisitions of the law, but Christ alone must be proposed for righteousness, who exceeds all the perfection of the law.

  

  John Calvin
  • God
  • Law
  • Confidence

• In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

  

  Larry Niven
  • May
  • Society
  • Hindsight

• Polar bears did very well in the warmer times. They didn't die out at all; they didn't die out in the last 10,000 years, nor during the previous interglacial, nor the one before that. So, they're just used as a deceitful heartthrob; you know, to pluck your heartstrings because the polar bears might die out.

  

  Piers Corbyn
  • Die

• 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