Literary Birthday – 17 August – Jonathan Franzen
Happy Birthday, Jonathan Franzen, born on 17 August 1959.
Jonathan Franzen Quotes
- But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
- Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
- 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.
- 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.
- More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming.
Read: Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules For Writing Fiction
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His six novels include the titles Freedom, The Corrections, and Purity. His works include themes of family dynamics, relationships, and the complexities of contemporary American life. Franzen published a memoir, The Discomfort Zone, in 2006. His five works of non-fiction and translation include The Kraus Project and Farther Away. In 2021, Franzen returned to fiction with Crossroads, which follows a family in 1970s suburban Chicago. Franzen also writes for The New Yorker magazine. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Follow him on Facebook.
Source for image: Author’s Website
by Amanda Patterson
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