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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
Realizing
Liberating
Security
Plates
Council
Involves
Plot
Step
Realize
Steps
Plate

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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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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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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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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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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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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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen