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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
Write
Didn
Writing
Really
Nonfiction
Enjoy

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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
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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 think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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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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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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