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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Heart
Guess
Trying
Exactly
Much
Break
Always
Point
Things
Happy
Think
Easy
Thinking
Else
Life
Certain
Hasn

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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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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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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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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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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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