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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Tiredness
Awake
Kept
Hurt
Much

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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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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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for? I don't know. I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
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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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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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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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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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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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