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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Hyena
Hyenas
Neutral
Integrity
Value
Pure
Values

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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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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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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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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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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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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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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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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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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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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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Jonathan Franzen
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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.
Jonathan Franzen