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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
Things
Happy
Think
Easy
Thinking
Else
Life
Certain
Hasn
Heart
Guess
Trying
Exactly
Much
Break
Always
Point

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You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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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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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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 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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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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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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