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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Sort
Disappear
Away
Bird
Species
Right
Moved
Think
Deep
Extremism
Thinking
Environment
Ecological
Started
Birds
Particular
Wild

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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.
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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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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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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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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