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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
Feels
Writers
Among
Taking
Writer
Trend
Next
Confess
Part
Trends
Take
Clearly
Feel
Seriously

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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[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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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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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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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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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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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