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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
Really
Nonfiction
Enjoy
Write
Didn
Writing

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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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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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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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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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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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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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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