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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Step
Realize
Steps
Plate
Realizing
Liberating
Security
Plates
Council
Involves
Plot

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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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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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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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