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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
Integrity
Intellectual
Reading
Sense
Something
Substantive
Enables
Ethical
Maintain

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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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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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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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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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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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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