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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
Begin
Trust
Stop
Overuse
Anyone
Notebook
Writing
Reads
Forgive
Evening
Forgiving

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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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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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