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.
Quotes to Explore
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I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
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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.
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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.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Both villains and heroes need to have a steadfast belief in themselves.
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Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.
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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.
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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.
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When I go home, I play with my baby dolls and strollers and diaper bags, and play with my sisters.
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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.
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If I do something, it's always 90% obvious and 10% unknown.
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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.
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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.
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To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering.
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Cinnamon bites and kisses simultaneously.
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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.
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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.
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Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That's probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.
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My mother cared a lot about clothes. It was a point of friction because when I was a teenager, and I only wanted to wear my father's shirts, and I never wanted to wear makeup, she would say: 'Put on lipstick.' That was her thing.
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My parents believed in exposing each of their children to an abundance of varied activities in the hope they would find something they loved. They each had found a passion - Dad with his music and Mom with her horses - so it was natural for them to encourage experimentation.
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It's easier making a smaller film like El Mariachi. There are no budget worries because there is no budget. There is no crew problem because there is no crew. And if you screw up, no one is around to see you screw up -- so it's no longer a screw up.
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It is crazy even to ask what creativity is. It would be just as useful to interview a caraway plant in your garden and ask: "How did you decided to be a spice?"
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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.
