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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
World
Point
Stillness
Actually
Engage
Read
Seriously
Write
Scary
Place
Decisions
Also
Otherwise
Writing
Responsible
Productively
Make
Decision
Unmanageable

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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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 was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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