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You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Chasing
Stillness
Sitting
Stills
Still

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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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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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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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 was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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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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