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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Looked
Either
Winning
Think
Thinking
Robins
Life
Robin
Straight
Turned

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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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 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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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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