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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
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Parents
Men
Grew
Think
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Thinking
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Like
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Pregnancy
People
Felt
Surrounded
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Older
Even
Late

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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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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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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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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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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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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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
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