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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Prison
Chip
American
Palm
Nothing
Burns
Self
Palms
Different
Chips
Kind
Pathetic
Cigarette
Showed
Inflicted
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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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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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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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.
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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
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