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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Without
Way
Canine
Seeming
Insecure
Approval
Seeking
Happy

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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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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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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
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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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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
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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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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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