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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Existential
Solution
Solitude
Solutions
Fiction
Problem
Best

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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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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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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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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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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 feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
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