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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Good
Sentences
Logic
Following
Pages
Start
Take
Refuge
Feel
Loyalty
Feels
Page

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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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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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 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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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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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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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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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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