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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Produced
Depth
Deep
Isolate
Novel
Voluntarily
Find
Report
Good
Depths
People
Reports
Novels

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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
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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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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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