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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
Life
Robin
Straight
Turned
Looked
Either
Winning
Think
Thinking
Robins

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Popularity has become its own justification.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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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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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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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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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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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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