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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Father
Looms
Figure
Large
Figures
Imagination

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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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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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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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