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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Uncles
Bone
Bones
Healthy
Break
Uncle

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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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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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[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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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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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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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 voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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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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I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
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I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
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