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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
People
Divorce
Witty
Necessarily
Nice
Funny
Fall
Idealist
Important
Narcissism
Love
Idealism

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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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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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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 most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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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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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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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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
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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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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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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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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'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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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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