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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Enjoy
Write
Didn
Writing
Really
Nonfiction

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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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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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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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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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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
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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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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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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.
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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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