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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Writing
Reads
Forgive
Evening
Forgiving
Begin
Trust
Stop
Overuse
Anyone
Notebook

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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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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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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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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 reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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 voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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