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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Needs
Fully
Work
Quiet
Antithesis
Every
Internet
Vulgar
Good
Deep
Imagined
Writer
Data
Imagination
Lots
Place
Leaves
Nothing
Brings
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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 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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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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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'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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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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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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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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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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