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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Used
Quickly
Still
Shapes
Find
Along
Hard
Rather
Rattles
Writing
Less
Rewrite
Think
Process
Whips
Thinking
Write
Unpleasant
Stills
Shape

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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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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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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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.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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