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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

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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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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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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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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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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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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.
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