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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Persons
Chosen
Person
Potential
Contradictory
Something
Choose
Liberating
Would
Wasn
Comforting
Rather
Collection
Free
Definite
Someone
Collections
Thought
Actual

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
Jonathan Franzen
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen
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You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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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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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
Jonathan Franzen