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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
American
Solve
Disturbed
Write
Bears
Authenticity
Helping
Weight
Refuge
Seems
Novel
Delusion
Problem
Problems
Expecting
Whole
Taken
Contemporary
Enough
Help
Sentences
Writing
Society
Bear
Peculiarly

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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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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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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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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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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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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