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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

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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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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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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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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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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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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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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