Quote

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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Like
Behinds
Summers
Lucky
Heirs
Behind
Dinosaurs
Leave
Selves
Lives
Birds
Better
Bird
Self
Summer
Long
Short

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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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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 can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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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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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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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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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.
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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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