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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Book
Page
Matter
Happenings
Writing
Happening
Every
Pages
Kind
Beginning
Something
Reading
Enjoy
Better
Irritated

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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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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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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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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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