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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Intellectual
Reading
Sense
Something
Substantive
Enables
Ethical
Maintain
Integrity

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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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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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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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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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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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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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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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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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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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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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