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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Brooklyn
Better
Made
Like
Proximity
Philadelphia
Manhattan

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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.
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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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.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for? I don't know. I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Jonathan Franzen