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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Voluntarily
Inflicted
Insanity
Level
Levels
Certain

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
Jonathan Franzen
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[T]o 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.
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