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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
Evening
Forgiving
Begin
Trust
Stop
Overuse
Anyone
Notebook
Writing
Reads
Forgive

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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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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 guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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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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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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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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