Jonathan Franzen

Literary Birthday – 17 August – Jonathan Franzen

Happy Birthday, Jonathan Franzen, born 17 August 1959.

Five Quotes

  1. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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 novels include the titles Freedom and The Corrections. Franzen also writes for The New Yorker magazine.

Source for image: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jonathan_Franzen_2011_Shankbone_2.JPG

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 17th August 2013
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