Jonathan Franzen Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• You're either reading a book or you're not.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Reading

  "Jonathan Franzen Blasts Author Videos ... In His Own Author Video", www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2010.

• What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Men, Credit

• I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Way, Firsts

• And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Smart, Book, Silence

  "The Passion of the Oprah" by Macy Halford, www.newyorker.com. September 17, 2010.

• I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except "Read the book." Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Hate, Book, People

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

• If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Spring, Real, Book

• I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Reading, Writing

• 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.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Reading, Novel

  "Jonathan Franzen Blasts Author Videos ... In His Own Author Video". www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2010.

• I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Unchanging, Come Up

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

• It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Reading, Writing

• It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Nice, Book, Writing

• I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Fun, Book, Writing

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