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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
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Jonathan Earl Franzen
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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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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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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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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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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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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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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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