Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Earl Franzenis an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedomgarnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1959
CountryUnited States of America
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.