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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Heartbreak
Unhappiness
Happiness
Right
Kind

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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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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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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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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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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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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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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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