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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Taking
Writer
Trend
Next
Confess
Part
Trends
Take
Clearly
Feel
Seriously
Feels
Writers
Among

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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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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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 reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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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 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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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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