Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds. "

Jonathan Franzen

Related Quotes:

" One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist. "

Jonathan Franzen

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears. "

Jonathan Franzen

" If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person. "

Jonathan Franzen

" The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need. "

Jonathan Franzen

" Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

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

Jonathan Franzen

" A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader. "

Jonathan Franzen

" Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I hate that word dysfunction. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I hate Whole Foods. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women's work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It's like there's no way to make myself not male. "

Jonathan Franzen

" The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we're not the measure of all things. "

Jonathan Franzen

" There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public - the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, 'Self-promote or die.' And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

" It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council. "

Jonathan Franzen

" I'm not fussy about my food. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man. "

Jonathan Franzen

" If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

" I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly. "

Jonathan Franzen