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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Globally
Freak
Suffer
Suffering
May
Locally

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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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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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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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 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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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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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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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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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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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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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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
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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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