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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Way
Strangers
Time
Connect
Effective
Stranger
Particularly
Distance
Across
Fiction

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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
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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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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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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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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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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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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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, 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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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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