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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
Take
Refuge
Feel
Loyalty
Feels
Page
Good
Sentences
Logic
Following
Pages
Start

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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?
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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 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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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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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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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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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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 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've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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